The Ragman
Text by a Reeds Brook Middle School student
as told by Alice Hawes
A horse and wagon are at your door. “Rags! Rags!” a voice yells. You hand out your rag bag, and the man collects the contents. The Rag Man, as many called him, would come every month to gather the extra clothes, blankets, sheets, towels, and coats that were past their prime. Ships were sent down to Boston to collect even more clothes. All the cloth was then transported to the Crosby Paper Mill in Hampden, Maine. A new man- a rag picker- then ripped all the buttons and buckles off of the sheets and clothes. The cloth was used to make the paper at the mill, and a portion of the paper was sent back to Boston to a newspaper company. The buttons, considered useless, were carelessly thrown into a barrel. The rag picker took the barrel home, and dumped its contents on the ground. These are the buttons and buckles that Mazie Douglass found, years later.
Mazie Douglass
It was a sunny day in the 1940s. Mazie Patten Varney Douglass was out planting bulbs in her garden. She used her shovel to dig, and tenderly placed a bulb. A shiny glint caught her attention. A button! What would this be doing in the soil? It must have been some children playing here years ago. As she kept digging, she uncovered more and more. Every color, every shape- even belt buckles were mixed up in the rubble. Collecting as many as she could find- eventually hundreds, she stored them neatly in labeled jars, miniature envelopes, and small bags. When her second husband, Russell Douglass, tilled the land, he too found many buttons, varying in shape and size. He brought those buttons to Mazie for her to clean, sort, and organize. She piled all her findings in a simple shopping bag.
Russell Douglass
Fifty years later, the bag was given to the Hampden Historical Society by Mazie’s son, Kenneth Varney. As more items were given to the Society, the buttons were forgotten. Years later, members of the Society uncovered the bag in a closet. Stuffed into a dark and dusty corner, the buttons had not seen light since the Historical Society had received them from Mr. Varney.
A plain brown shopping bag, falling apart from age, covered in creases, its handles ripping. But filled inside this seemingly ordinary bag- treasures. Shoe boxes and small pouches filled with various buttons were crammed into the shopping bag. Glass jars and minuscule handmade envelopes- all filled with wonders. The buttons are small and large, some washed, some still packed with dirt. Some white, some brown, some colorful- many shapes, many sizes, many colors. Made of vegetable ivory, bakelite, wood, metal, hard rubber, horn, shells, and glass. Carved and painted into the buttons are various designs: lines and dots, animals, words, the faces of coins, and more. Some of the buttons are indented, while others are shaped like small balls. The well-known pie crust buttons are scattered throughout the bag- easy to identify with the ridges that resemble the indentations that you would make on the edges of a pie. We usually use buttons to connect one piece of clothing to another, but now these buttons are a connection between us and Hampden’s history.
