Coat button
By the 1790s, large, luminescent disks made of exotic materials had superseded the earlier taste for modest buttons of metal or fabric on men's coats. This pink conch shell button, set in gold with a silver-plated boss and a gilt ten-pointed star at its center, is one of many believed to have been owned by George Washington. Washington purportedly gave this button to Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, his aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, who in turn had it mounted as a pin and presented to his wife.
Published ReferencesMartha Gandy Fales, Jewelry in America: 1600-1900 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Antique Collectors' Club, 1995), 126.
Mary Elizabeth Hite, My Rappahannock Story Book (Richmond, VA: The Dietz Press, Inc., 1950), 298- 299.