✅ SOLVED Hopefully this works!

J.Cohoon04 · Jan 1, 2014

Found this out today around an old grocery store in central VA, it was covered in brick mortar, has anyone seen one of these? It seems to be aluminum and about the size of a dime with an iron cross looking raised center.

wvwildman · Jan 1, 2014

nice button

TheCannonballGuy · Jan 1, 2014

Seen 'em before. It is called a "4-hole button" and was used in various applications. We civil war diggers call them an undershirt/underwear button, because they were used on longjohns underwear. In later years they were used as a pants-waist button and pants-fly button. The World War One era US Army is known to have used zinc 4-hole buttons for that purpose... but of course, the vast majority of 4-hole buttons are Civilian-used.

If yours is made of aluminum, like you say it is, it's from no earlier than the very-late 1800s, and more probably from the 20th Century.

J.Cohoon04 · Jan 1, 2014

Thank you CBG! Will have to mark this solved next time Im on my computer.

wvwildman · Jan 1, 2014

thanks for the info CBG i've found a few of them around here

J.Cohoon04 · Jan 6, 2014

Hey CBG, I brought this into work and analyzed it with our materials analyzer, it's actually a zinc button. Does that date it differently possibly?

TheCannonballGuy · Jan 8, 2014

Thanks for professionally confirming the identity of the metal your 4-hole button is made of -- which turns out to be Zinc. As I mentioned in my previous reply, the US Army used zinc 4-hole buttons (on Army uniform pants) in the World War One era. You can recognize those because the larger ones have "U.S.*ARMY*" on them in raised letters, and the smaller ones say simply "*U.S.A.*" in raised letters. (See the photos posted below, including the dated label on the uniform's pants.) Your zinc 4-hole button still has a lot of crud-concretion on it. You might want to do some gentle scraping to see if it has any lettering (either raised or indented).

I do not know when ZINC 4-hole buttons were first manufactured. All I can say is that I've never heard of any being found in the BOTTOM of a civil war army camp hut-hole or battle-trench. "Surface" finds (meaning, found in the topsoil layer of the ground) cannot be relied on, due to post-civil-war junk commonly littering civil war sites. So, I would estimate your zinc 4-hole button being from the latter-1800s at the earliest, or the first half of the 20th Century.

Please let us know if your 4-hole button turns out to have any kind of lettering on it.

J.Cohoon04 · Jan 8, 2014

I forgot to mention that this button appeared to have been saved from a building fire by getting encased in the grout between some bricks when a repair or initial installation of the grout was done. Is there a safe way to remove it without destroying the button any more than I already have on the face?

J.Cohoon04 · Jan 10, 2014

Some vinegar soaking worked wonders on it, she's a little rough, but can totally make out the US Army split by stars on either side of the button!!

TheCannonballGuy · Jan 10, 2014

Thanks for the effort of cleaning your zinc 4-hole button to check for lettering. Yours turns out to say "US*ARMY*" so it is from the World War One era, and it is the larger of the two sizes shown in the photo I posted previously. The larger size was the uniform pants waist-closure button. The smaller version said only "*USA*" and served as the pants fly-closure buttons.