The Button King's legacy lives on in quirky South Carolina museum

When J.D. Stevens flips on the lights in the shed by his South Carolina home, he feels the presence of his dad, who died nearly a decade ago. He also sees hundreds of thousands of buttons. They are sewn onto the original button suit on the mannequin that started it all. Nearby is the Chevrolet Chevette covered in buttons of all colors, big and small. There's a walk-in outhouse with a toilet covered in buttons and a piano with buttons everywhere but the keys. There's a button-covered hearse not too far from the coffin where white buttons stand out from all the rest, spelling out "BUTTON KING.

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Dalton Stevens started on the road to become the Button King one night in 1983 while battling insomnia and, after retiring, a feeling of worthlessness and withdrawal from the world. He got an epiphany to start sewing buttons onto a denim suit because, as he said, "television went off at two in the morning back then."

Back in the 1980s, one didn't trend to the top overnight. Once Stevens finished the original button suit, a tiny newspaper in Bishopville wrote a story. Then the local TV station did its own package. Stevens kept sewing and gluing buttons and once he finished covering the entire Chevette there was a second local TV story picked up by that fledgling all-news network CNN.