acnoob.blogg.se

Southwestern Indiana is almost as close to Arkansas as it is to Cincinnati. He also mentions that New York dealers were often ripped off by sellers masquerading Arkansas pearls as Asian.Īrkansas’ rivers were quickly “pearled out,” but the pearl boom spread and reached its peak around 1905-1910.

The writer tells a story, perhaps exaggerated like much of his account, that an African American family who had lived in poverty made enough money pearling to build a large house and hire white servants. New York pearl dealers flocked there in great numbers. Streets were laid out, banks and mercantile establishments were started, mortgages were lifted, money was plenty and times were prosperous. New towns were built and old ones were increased to the size of cities. Their crews deserted them, and sometimes their captains, and the Black River was the scene of the wildest excitement. The excitement spread from the land to the river steamboats. Within the past three years more than $3,000,000 worth of pearls have been taken from the Mississippi Valley. A writer for the Indianapolis Journal reported in 1903: Arkansas’ pearl boom had all the hallmarks of an old-time gold rush. In that year, a pearl frenzy erupted along the Black and White Rivers near Newport, Arkansas. Though a few button factories existed in Indiana before the Civil War - relying on shell, horn, and bone - the American freshwater pearl boom didn’t really gain momentum until 1900. Prices were low at the time and the “Pulaski County Pearl Diver Association” went bust. Louis and Cincinnati to ask about the value of freshwater pearls. Louis Community College.)Īmong Indiana’s early settlers, “diving” for pearls hidden in freshwater mussels dates back to at least 1846, when farmers at Winamac founded a small stockholders association to try to market shells taken from the Tippecanoe River. (Shell disks from a burial mound at Cahokia, Illinois. In the year 1200, Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from the future site of St. The Mound Builder cultures that once occupied the American heartland found many ways to use mussels and left behind enormous refuse piles - what archaeologists call “middens” - in their towns, which almost always sat beside creeks and rivers. As many as 400 species probably lived in the Ohio Valley in 1800. Beloit College Archives.)Īt the time of European settlement, midwestern rivers abounded in mussels. The rods were often made out of cast-off gas pipes.

Mussels would clamp down on hooks and not let go until they were cooked off. (Man on a johnboat on the Rock River outside Beloit, Wisconsin, circa 1911. “The meat was fed to hogs or used as bait.” Shells were sent off to button factories.) He kept a “cooker” on hand to steam the mussel shells open. (This photo taken on the Wabash River at Vincennes, Indiana, around 1905 shows a pearl fisherman in his boathouse. Yet in spite of its nostalgic appeal, the pearl button industry also wreaked havoc on the environment and on workers in factories. How synthetic goods are made (i.e., the zippers, plastic buttons, and Velcro that partly replaced shell around 1950) may seem less “romantic” than the work of pearl fishermen hauling shiny treasures out of Midwestern streams in johnboats.

If you’re keeping a list of industries (like steel and auto manufacturing) that have declined and even vanished from the Midwest, add one more: pearl button making.Ĭonsumers today rarely give a thought to where buttons come from. One lost industry that had a brief “boom and bust” over most of the eastern U.S. a century ago was closely tied to the life of the rivers. But before modern transportation severed so much of our connection to waterways, human contact with rivers practically defined life in water-rich Indiana. Today, we drive over rivers and creeks in a few seconds and barely know their names.