August 11th ~ Day 128 of our 2014 Road Trip

Since 2003 I have planned on, tried to get around to, posting Mississippi river crossings and to this point I have only done one before – LINK.

After spending the night in a casino parking lot in Riverside, Iowa we planned on a morning crossing of the river at Muscatine, we found a neat riverside park to view and photograph the bridge we were going to use to cross.

The Norbert F. Beckey Bridge completed in December 1972 , carries Iowa Highway 92 across the Mississippi River.

Pearl Harvest BronzeAt the park we saw the huge bronze statue and I been thinking all this time they harvested pearls outta the Missisip!

From Wikipedia
In 1884 J.F. Boepple, a German immigrant, founded a pearl button company. He produced buttons that looked like pearls by machine-punching them out of freshwater mussel shells harvested from the Mississippi River. Muscatine’s slogan, “Pearl of the Mississippi,” refers to the days when pearl button manufacturing by the McKee Button Company was a significant economic contributor. In 1915, Weber & Sons Button Co., Inc. was the world’s largest producer of fancy freshwater pearl buttons. From that time forward, Muscatine was known as “The Pearl Button Capital of the World”. Weber is still manufacturing today and celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2004. Muscatine is nearly as well known as the “Watermelon Capital of the World”.

 

Don’t I feel foolish?

 

 

August 11th ~ Day 128 of our 2014 Road Trip

 

– We have pinned this post on our Mississippi River Crossings Map Show on Map
and
– We have pinned this post on our 2014 Road Trip Map Show on Map