Hward56 wrote:
> Hunting a old Louisiana plantation daring back to the late 1700... Found this button...cleaned it up best I could...started rubbing into the brass and stopped... Any info would very much be appreciative.
The fact that you did not immediately know exactly what kind of button you dug tells us you need even the most-basic info about it.
It is what button collectors call a flat brass 1-piece button, which relic-diggers call simply a brass flatbutton. The term one-piece means it did not have a separately-made front and back. The loop for sewing it onto the garment does not count as a "piece."
Also, instead of being solid-cast by pouring molten metal into a mold, your flatbutton was made of brass which had been pressed into a sheet, and then discs were stamp-cut out of the sheet. Afterward, sometimes a "backmark" (maker/dealer's name, or a quality-rating) was stamped into what would become the button's back. Then a brass or copper wire loop was brazed or soldered onto the back. The specific type of brass button you found seems to first appear in the mid-to-latter 1700s. Brass ones which have a raised-lettering backmark first appear in the very late 1700s. The first ones having an indented-lettering backmark appeared around 1810. These brass 1-piece flatbuttons fell out of favor with the public in the 1830s due to the advent of inexpensively priced "ornate emblem" 2-piece brass buttons.
Explanation of your brass 1-piece flatbutton's backmark:
One these buttons, the word Gilt always means gold. (Plated meant silverplate.) Treble Gilt means triple-coated with gold.
Rich Orange described the color of the gold. Orange meant the gold contained about 10-to-15% copper, which had the effect of changing the gold's color to orange-ish. When a higher percentage of copper was added into the alloy, like 25% or more, it changed the gold's color to pink-ish… which was/is called Rose Gold.
In summary:
Because your indented-backmark brass 1-piece flatbutton was dug in the US, it dates from about 1810 into the 1830s. The backmark saying Rich Orange indicates it most likely was made in Britain. The War-Of-1812 (to 1815) interrupted the supply from England, and in the years following the war Americans (understandably) disfavored British-made products... therefore, very few of these buttons were imported until the mid-1820s. But by that time, the young American button-making industry had finally become capable of producing large quantities of these 1-piece buttons, thereby diminishing the need to import them.
