Margery Lindholm keeps her buttons in a Hepplewhite-style mahogany cabinet that her father bought at a Belfast, Maine estate sale in 1958. The cabinet has seven drawers. She has long since spilled into a second cabinet, and a third, but the first one is still where the work began.
She started collecting in March 1965, when she was eleven. Her grandmother, Astrid Lindholm, had been a seamstress for the Rockland clothiers Fuller and Cobb. When Astrid died that winter, Margery was given a tin of about four hundred orphaned buttons cut from garments over forty years.
The tin, a green Mackintosh's toffee box from before the war, is still in the cabinet. Margery does not display its buttons. She keeps them as her grandmother left them, loose, unsorted, a little dusty.
What grew around that tin is now one of the most carefully indexed private button collections in New England. Margery's most recent count, made in February 2026 for an insurance schedule, listed 11,842 buttons across the three cabinets and a small overflow box on the parlor windowsill.
She does not call it a collection. She calls it the cabinet, in the singular, even though there are three. The cabinet is a workplace, she said. It is not a museum.
Her method has settled over the decades into something close to library practice. Each tray is lined with acid-free cream tissue from a paper-conservation supplier in Newton, Massachusetts. Each button is sewn, not glued, to its tray with a single loop of cotton thread.
She prefers cotton because it does not interact with brass, copper, or pewter at room humidity. She replaced the last of the nylon thread in 2003, after she noticed a faint yellowing where the nylon touched a pewter livery button from a Connecticut estate.
The trays are arranged by material first, then by century, then by use. Tray 4-B is mid-eighteenth-century brass coat buttons. Tray 9-A is nineteenth-century jet mourning buttons, of which she has 162.
Tray 12-C is what she calls her quiet tray. It holds the buttons she cannot date, attribute, or place. There are 247 of them. She visits the tray about once a month and rarely solves anything, but she does not put it away.
The collection's strongest run is American military, 1812 through the Spanish-American War. She has 1,103 buttons in that group, including a complete set of New York State Militia coat buttons by Scovill of Waterbury, dated by their backmarks to between 1830 and 1841.
She bought most of those at the Brimfield Antique Show across the 1980s, when American military buttons were still a quiet specialty. I paid eight dollars apiece for buttons that are sixty now, she said. I was lucky. I did not know I was lucky.
The cabinet also holds about two hundred Victorian picture buttons in stamped brass, a smaller run of Norwegian filigree silver buttons from a single 1898 wedding bunad, and four glass buttons attributed, tentatively, to the studio of Émile Gallé.
The Gallé attribution is the one she will not commit to in writing. She has been to Nancy three times to study comparable pieces at the Musée de l'École de Nancy, and she still considers the matter open.
Margery has corresponded for thirty-one years with another button collector, a retired physician named Harold Crisp in Topsham, Maine. They have never met. They write letters by hand, about four a year, and they exchange occasional buttons by registered post.
Crisp's collection is smaller, about three thousand pieces, but stronger in eighteenth-century English livery. Their correspondence is now in a separate drawer of the parlor cabinet, indexed by date. Margery considers the letters part of the collection.
Her catalogue is kept in two forms. There is a card file in the lower drawer of the cabinet, one card per button, written in a fine round hand in 0.5 mm pencil. There is also a spreadsheet, which she started in 2011 at the suggestion of her son.
The spreadsheet has 11,842 rows and forty-one columns. The card file is more accurate. The spreadsheet is for the insurance company, she said. The cards are for me.
She has refused several offers from regional museums to acquire the collection. Most recently, in November 2025, the Penobscot Marine Museum approached her about a long-term loan of the military run. She declined politely, and they took it well.
Her stated reason is that the cabinet is still working. She still buys buttons, about thirty a year, mostly from a single dealer in Wiscasset who knows the gaps. As long as she is filling gaps, she said, the cabinet is not a thing to be donated.
Margery is seventy-two. She has not yet made arrangements for what happens to the collection after her. Her son lives in Oregon and does not collect. Her daughter, a hospice nurse in Bangor, has asked to be given the toffee tin and nothing else.
I have thought about it, Margery said. I have not decided. I do not feel rushed.
The cabinet stands in the corner of her parlor where the afternoon light reaches it for about ninety minutes a day. She closes the drawers before the light arrives. The pewter and the silver, she said, do not love the sun.