Button Dusters
In the early years of Federalsburg, there was one main industry besides farming: a local button factory that imported mother-of-pearl and manufactured buttons. The Excelsior Pearl Works factory began operating in March 1930 and made 144,000,000 buttons a year. The company shipped buttons in a variety of sizes all over the United States.
The Excelsior Pearl Works factory was well known in the community. In fact, the dust and debris that was produced when the buttons were punched covered the local pond and beach and became the inspiration for the name of an early baseball team: The Federalsburg Button Dusters.
The bigger pieces of unusable, broken buttons lined the walkways around Federal Park, the baseball stadium for the Federalsburg Athletics. Remnants of buttons can still be found surrounding the area where the stadium once stood.