A Farewell to Grandmother's Buttons

A Farewell to Grandmother’s Buttons

After almost forty years, one of Louisiana's most beloved brands says goodbye

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

As 2022 rushed to a close, Susan Davis spent her December days as she has for the past thirty-seven years: sitting with her closest friends around a table glittering with vintage glass, beads, brass, and buttons, buttons, buttons—making jewelry.

This year was different, though. This “Mount Everest” of orders they were climbing would be Grandmother’s Buttons’ last. The end of an era. “I’m glad to be busy,” Susan said when I called her in the thick of it. “It keeps me from being sad.” This is what she said she’d miss the most, spending so much time with her employees— most of whom have been part of the business for decades and have become her dearest friends.

In November, when Susan and her husband Donny announced their retirement and the closure of their beloved jewelry business at the heart of St. Francisville—a long-dedicated customer base leapt at this final opportunity to add pieces of Susan’s designs to their collections, already rare treasures soon to be rarer. “We sold about half-ayear’s-worth of orders overnight,” she said.

A difficult decision made with their family’s needs in mind, the Davises’ closing of Grandmother’s Buttons has fostered an overflowing of gratitude for a local business that has so enriched its community, and enchanted wearers all over the world. Reflecting on her thirty-seven years as a jewelry-maker, Susan acknowledged Buttons’ role in shaping her friendships, fostering incredible family memories, and feeding her own creative spirit.

It all started in 1985, she said, with a button in a pile in her ninety-five-year-old grandmother’s house. She and Donny had just moved back to her hometown of St. Francisville to start a specialty vegetable farm, and to be near family.

She had gone one afternoon to visit her grandmother, Bettie, with whom she shared a love of old things and family heirlooms. “She never threw a single thing away,” remembered Susan. Not a photograph, not a piece of jewelry, not a button. “She had boxes and boxes of them.”

From the pile, a jet luster Czech glass button caught Susan’s eye. “Grandma, this would make a beautiful earring.”

And Grandmother’s Buttons was born. At the time, Susan was looking for a job to supplement Donny’s farming, and in that moment she simply decided, “This is going to be my job.” Not long after, she attended her first craft show in the Broadmoor neighborhood of Baton Rouge, peddling pieces of jewelry she’d created using buttons from her grandmother’s collection. “I barely spent any money and made $1,000 that day. And that was in the eighties!”

In the years to come, Susan would quickly run through her grandmother’s button collection, then her mother’s, then her other grandmother’s. Thus, began the great button hunt—an adventure that continued for over three decades. Susan has traveled to every state on the mainland except for the Dakotas, connecting with collectors, climbing into attics, shoveling through warehouses in Manhattan’s Garment District, bargaining in flea markets.

Since 1994 when the business found its home in St. Francisville’s circa-1905 Romanesque bank building on the corner of Royal and Prosperity streets, her collection has taken over the second-story studio, spilling out of drawers and piled into crannies—an archive of tens of thousands of buttons organized with a “deeply hidden logic” comprehensible only to Susan, whose journey with this business has bestowed upon her with the honorary title of a bonafide button-ologist. These are not just pretty things made into prettier things. Each button has a story, and Susan and her staff always worked to honor those stories, while ushering them into their next life.

Some of the jewels of Susan’s collection include the last stocks of Mississippi River mother-of-pearl buttons produced by the American Pearl Button Company of Washington; one-of-a-kind hand-painted porcelain buttons from the late nineteenth century, once marketed as blank canvases for crafty housewives; and perfume buttons, made with velvet intended for absorbing and carrying a woman’s signature scent—once sewn into the lapels of their lovers when they went off to war. Susan has made jewelry from a cache of Bethlehem pearls handcrafted by a family who once sent Grandmother’s Buttons an email saying “Buy our products so our family can stay in the Holy Land and not think about immigrating,” and now sends Susan videos of their Christmas parades each year. From a New Orleans antique dealer, Susan once procured two boxes of rare Czech glass buttons discovered in an abandoned elevator shaft in the French Quarter—the same sort of button she’d pulled from her grandmother’s collection in 1985. The finest and rarest of these treasures—including a hand-chased brass button depicting an eagle, designed for and worn at George Washington’s inauguration in 1783—are displayed in the nationally-recognized Button Museum inside the old bank’s original vault.

When it comes to the jewelry, though, every piece was planned and constructed with each tiny button and the larger history it represents at the forefront—whether that be the craftspeople who made it or the societal environment that produced it. Using fashion as a means to carry these artifacts into the future, Susan and her designers drew from historic styles to create modern heirlooms entrenched in history.

But the process never began with design, said Susan. “It begins with the hunt.” After making one of their annual adventures, the Grandmother’s Buttons staff would return home with their treasures, and, in a ritual of sorts, set up two big tables in the studio. They’d group the finds by color, and then—amidst all of the history and the giggling recollections of recent travels and the gentle rattling of buttons being handled—the magic happened.

“It really is putting a puzzle together,” said Susan. “It usually takes about two and a half to three months for us to finish that puzzle. And we usually produce about one hundred new designs a year.” Susan estimates that in recent years, the team was creating about 30,000 individual pieces annually, which have been sold in over four hundred stores nationwide, as well as in several of the world’s most esteemed museums including the Smithsonian, the American Folk Art Museum, the British Museum, and the Palace of Versailles.

But the heart of it was always St. Francisville—a small, picturesque Louisiana town set so very apart from the fashion industry’s jewelry manufacturing hubs, but where Susan’s grandmother was, where her parents and her sisters were, where she always hoped to raise her family. And where she did. In those early days of the 1980s, Susan joined two other women entrepreneurs in the little town—Robin Marshall, who opened the “living room of St. Francisville” that is The Magnolia Café, and Dorcas Woods, who started this very magazine. “We just really relished having these businesses that were successful and growing and working together,” remembered Susan. “And we’ve really kind of had a strong bond the whole way.”

Almost forty years later, as St. Francisville begins to appear on more and more travel guides to the South, the little town has begun to settle comfortably into its growing reputation as a haven of specialty, locally-owned retail—drawing clientele from shoppers and weekenders from miles ‘round who want something slower-paced than the nearby cities of Baton Rouge or New Orleans. One might argue that such a reputation found its origins in a little jewelry store started in Susan’s upstairs bedroom in 1985, that it all started with a button.

Though Grandmother’s Buttons officially ceased all jewelry manufacturing as of December 31, the St. Francisville store on Royal and Prosperity will remain open through early 2023, with some remaining jewelry for sale and specialty non-jewelry items from the Designer Collection.