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it—the population of the continent was expanding at an enormous rate—and buttons could be made cheaply and sold cheaply, and this (said Reenie) was just the ticket for my grandfather, who’d seen the opportunity and used the brains God gave him.
    His forbears had come up from Pennsylvania in the 1820s to take advantage of cheap land, and of construction opportunities—the town had been burnt out during the War of 1812, and there was considerable rebuilding to be done. These people were something Germanic and sectarian, crossbred with seventh-generation Puritans—an industrious but fervent mix that produced, in addition to the usual collection of virtuous, lumpen farmers, three circuit riders, two inept land speculators, and one petty embezzler—chancers with a visionary streak and one eye on the horizon. In my grandfather this came out as gambling, although the only thing he ever gambled on was himself.
    His father had owned one of the first mills in Port Ticonderoga, a modest grist mill, in the days when everything was run by water. When he’d died, of apoplexy, as it was then called, my grandfather was twenty-six. He inherited the mill, borrowed money, imported the button machinery from the States. The first buttons were made from wood and bone, and the fancier ones from cow horns. These last two materials could be obtained for next to nothing from the several abattoirs in the vicinity, and as for the wood, it lay all round about, clogging up the land, and people were burning it just to get rid of it. With cheap raw materials and cheap labour and an expanding market, how could he have failed to prosper?
    The buttons turned out by my grandfather’s company were not the kinds of buttons I liked best as a girl. No tiny mother-of-pearl ones, no delicate jet, none in white leather for ladies’ gloves. The family buttons were to buttons as rubber overshoes were to footgear—stolid, practical buttons, for overcoats and overalls and work shirts, with something robust and even crude about them. You could picture them on long underwear, holding up the flap at the back, and on the flies of men’s trousers. The things they concealed would have been pendulous, vulnerable, shameful, unavoidable—the category of objects the world needs but scorns.
    It’s hard to see how much glamour would have attached itself to the granddaughters of a man who made such buttons, except for the money. But money or even the rumour of it always casts a dazzling light of sorts, so Laura and I grew up with a certain aura. And in Port Ticonderoga, nobody thought the family buttons were funny or contemptible. Buttons were taken seriously there: too many people’s jobs depended on them for it to have been otherwise.
    Over the years my grandfather bought up other mills and turned them into factories as well. He had a knitting factory for undershirts and combinations, another one for socks, and another one that made small ceramic objects such as ashtrays. He prided himself on the conditions in his factories: he listened to complaints when anyone was brave enough to make them, he regretted injuries when they’d been brought to his notice. He kept up with mechanical improvements, indeed with improvements of all kinds. He was the first factory owner in town to introduce electric lighting. He thought flower beds were good for the workers’ morale—zinnias and snapdragons were his stand-bys, as they were inexpensive and showy and lasted a long time. He declared that conditions for the females in his employ were as safe as those in their own parlours. (He assumed they had parlours. He assumed these parlours were safe. He liked to think well of everybody.) He refused to tolerate drunkenness on the job, or coarse language, or loose behaviour.
    Or this is what is said of him inThe Chase Industries: A History, a book my grandfather commissioned in 1903 and had privately printed, in green leather covers, with riot only the title but his own candid, heavy