On June 17, 1777, Congress ordered payment to Col. David Mason of the 15th Virginia Regiment for “a pair of button moulds, which he procured for the use of the said regiment.” The amount allowed for the newly-raised regiment was $16.60. Years later, in 1818, veteran John Simpson swore to an Ohio court that “he enlisted near Winchester Virginia in spring of seventy six” in Capt. Thomas Berry’s company of the “eighth regiment Virginia line as numbered on our buttons.”


There is little doubt, then, that soldiers of the Virginia Line wore jackets with numbered buttons as soon as they began transitioning out of the hunting shirts they were first issued as uniforms in 1775 and 1776. Yet museums, archaeologists, and hobbyists with metal detectors have yet to find a single example.


Buttons from the 3rd company of Maryland Mattrosses, the 8th Massachusetts Regiment, the New York Line, the North Carolina Line, the 3rd North Carolina Regiment, the 2nd Pennsylvania Battalion, the Rhode Island Regiment, the 2nd South Carolina Regiment, and two varieties of general service Continental Army buttons. To date, no Virginia buttons have been found.


In the north, the army issued numbered buttons early in the war. As he worked to transform the 1775 rabble outside Boston into a regular army, George Washington ordered, “The Colonels upon the new Establishment to settle, as soon as possible, with the Qr Mr General, the Uniform of their respective regiments; that the buttons may be properly number’d, and the work finished without delay.” 


Buttons with Virginia-specific designs were probably not new. The 1st and 2nd Virginia Provincial regiments of the French & Indian War may have had them. A button found at the Calvert House in Annapolis several decades ago bears a shield containing what a researcher has called “the arms of the Virginia colony, with a crown on top.” The researcher notes, “This shield and crown motif is virtually identical to that on the obverse of the 1773 Virginia halfpenny” and suggests, “This button may have been used by colonial Virginia troops during the early 1770s.” While conceding that “Much of the detail is indistinct,” the researcher is wrong about one thing. The arms on the 1773 halfpenny are not Virginia's. They are the arms of the first three Hanoverian kings, which remained unchanged from 1714 to 1801.


Virginia had no provincial troops between 1762 and 1775, and custom buttons for militia are unlikely. Could this item be a French & Indian War button? Perhaps more likely, a unit of county “independent” troops (volunteers) may have had them made in 1774 or 1775. Either scenario would date the button to before 1776, when use of the king’s arms was still appropriate. Buttons with the post-independence “Sic Semper Tyrannis” seal exist in great numbers, but are evidently all post-Revolutionary.


Despite the seal, however, it may not be a military button at all. It would not be particularly strange for a coin to be refashioned into a button, but we are told that “the back has a mold seam mark.” Molded buttons with coin designs were also evidently popular in the late 18th century. A copper-alloy button with the molded pattern of a Mexico City pillar dollar coin ws found in 1999 at Fort Frederick, Maryland. The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory catalog entry says, "The button is cast as one piece, and does not represent a coin that has been converted into a button. It is less than half the size of the coin it mimics." So, the Calvert House button may be a red herring.

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The 1773 Virginia halfpenny was minted at the Tower of London.

Uniform buttons from several other states survive, including from the Old Dominion’s neighbors. Examples of a North Carolina Line button have been found, cast in pewter, sporting an intertwined “USA” with an “N” above and a “C” below. A Maryland artillery button with “MM” on one line and “3” below has been identified as belonging to a soldier in the 3rd company of Maryland Matrosses. Examples from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina have also been found.


Why not Virginia? It seems odd that the largest colony, which fielded 15 Continental regiments of foot and even more into the artillery and the State line, has come up short on buttons. The likely explanation is happenstance. Examples of all state-specific buttons are rare, and most have been dug from the ground. While the 8th and 15th Virginia regiments can be shown to have had numbered buttons, other regiments may have relied on the more plentiful general-service “USA” buttons that are found in many places. There is also record of two shipments of "80 Dble Gross plain Mettle butts" and "32 dble Gross plain mettle buttons" from Virginia to the encampment at Valley Forge. A gross is 144 and a double gross is 288. Virginia evidently shipped more than 32,000 buttons along with fabric, thread, and other materials. That's a large number, but a uniform coat may have carried as many as 32 buttons (as the French-pattern lottery coat did).


Frederick Hisel's pension application includes a shakier reference to numbered buttons. He said he enlisted in Captain John Roberts' company in Colonel Francis Taylor's Regiment in 1777, which appears to mean the Convention Army Guard, a State regiment.  In 1818 he said he did "not remember the Number of the Regiment but thinks the buttons on the clothing which they drew were marked the eighth Regiment." In 1820  he said they were marked with a seven. Though Hisel was not a Continental soldier and his memory was inconsistent, the mere fact that he recalled Virginia buttons with numbers on them is meaningful.


Somewhere in the eighteenth-century landscape, Virginia buttons may still lie beneath the soil. If one surfaces, it might not be instantly identifiable given the lack of comparators. If one could be identified by design,  construction, or archaeological context, it would provide the first securely documented example of a Virginia Continental button.


(Updated September 28, 2026 with input from Jim Mullins.)


​GABRIEL NEVILLE is the author of The Last Men Standing: The 8th Virginia Regiment in the American Revolution.