Pearl jewelry has always evoked the essence of the sea. One imagines giant clams, or beds of oysters and pearl divers swimming down to grab what they can while holding their breath. The image of the tropic seas, warm sun and salty breeze gives way to a different reality. Natural pink pearls are beautiful. Pearls jewelry using these pink beads is lovely and surprising. It's surprising because these unique pearls are found in the Miami River in Ohio.
The Ohio valley offered up a tremendous number of fresh water pearls and was a booming business towards the end of the 19th century. Pearls pulled from the river had a range of colors including; creamy white, alabaster, blue, green, pink and rose colored. These pearls can still be found today and are considered valuable because they are naturally grown.
While pearl diving had been the method of bringing pearls to the market in the past, today the production of pearls is much more domestic. Pearls are now cultivated by injecting foreign material into a mollusk. The mollusk covers the irritant like it would in the wild, with aragonite and conchiolin, and the farmers harvest the pearls. The commercial market is made up of mostly cultivated and synthetic pearls. This creates a valuable niche for natural pearls and the pearls from the Ohio Valley.
Long before boys were digging in the mud with their toes looking for mollusks that might contain a pearl, the Native Americans of the Ohio Valley were harvesting them. Artifacts have been found in the mounds that point to an abundance of pearls. They were once thought to be part of a trading route with coastal tribes, but latter after the discovery of the fresh water pearls, archeologists believe them to be from the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. These pearls were used as beads and sometimes flattened so they could be sewn onto garments. They could also be found set into copper work. Fresh water pearls, like marine pearls come in a variety of shapes and sizes. In fact, it is very rare to get a perfectly round pearl. Less then 1% of fresh water natural pearls are round. Most are oblong or rice shaped. Pearls are considered organic gemstones, and both Tennessee and Kentucky have named the fresh water pearl the state gem. During the turn of the century many people enjoyed spending a summer day pearling, digging through the mud and looking for the odd shaped pearls.
Fresh water pearls have become rarer over the years because of habitat destruction. Fresh water pearls require moving water and shoals. The damming of many of the rivers in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee has changed the flow of the river and altered the environment that the clams thrived on. They can still be found today, but not in as abundant proportions as years ago. The good news is that fresh water pearls can produce more then one pearl at a time, unlike their marine counter parts. While the shapes may be pear like, oblong or like a piece of rice, they are naturally produced and come in a wide variety of colors making them cherished adornments.
Print this page
