This is a true story, retold as a tale. Grandpa Earl and his grandson are imagined, but the fried pearl, the Queen Pearl and the great American pearl rush really happened.
The river was brown and slow that summer afternoon, and the cicadas were singing so loud you could hardly hear yourself think. Grandpa Earl sat on the dock with his feet in the water, and his grandson Tyler sat beside him, poking at a pile of mussel shells with a stick.
"These are gross," Tyler said.
Grandpa Earl picked one up and turned it over. The inside of the shell shone like a rainbow, white and pink and silver. "Gross? Boy, there was a time when people in this country went crazy over these. Tore up whole rivers looking inside them."
"Why?"
Grandpa Earl smiled. "Pearls. Let me tell you about the man who fried a fortune."
The Fried Pearl
"Back in 1857, way up in New Jersey, there was a little creek called Notch Brook. People would gather the mussels there for supper. One day a fellow named David Howell went home with a bucket of them and fried them up in a pan.
"And when he bit into one, his teeth hit something hard. He spit it out, and it was a pearl. A big, round pearl, nearly the size of a marble."
Tyler's eyes went wide. "Was he rich?"
Grandpa Earl shook his head sadly. "The heat of the frying pan had ruined it. All the beautiful shine was cooked right off. He'd fried away a fortune."
Tyler burst out laughing.
The Queen Pearl
"But that's not the end. That same year, a carpenter named Jacob Quackenbush was gathering mussels in the same brook. He opened one, and inside was a pink pearl, glowing like the inside of a seashell at sunset.
"He didn't know what it was worth, so he took it to New York, to a jeweler named Charles Tiffany. Mr. Tiffany bought it from him for about fifteen hundred dollars, a fortune back then. And do you know who ended up wearing that pearl?"
Tyler shook his head.
"The Empress of France! Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. That's why folks have called it the Queen Pearl ever since. A pearl from a creek in New Jersey, on a French empress."
Pearl Fever
"Well, when the newspapers printed that story, the whole country caught pearl fever. Folks rushed to every creek and river they could find. Hundreds of people at a time stood in Notch Brook, pulling up mussels by the bucket. Then the fever spread west: Ohio, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas. People went up and down the rivers of the Mississippi with boats and rakes and hooks."
"Did they find a lot?"
"Some of them found beautiful pearls. Pink, white, even purple. But most people found nothing at all. And they opened millions of mussels doing it. Whole beds of them were wiped out."
Grandpa Earl was quiet for a moment, looking at the water.
"That's the sad part of the story. They wanted the treasure so badly they forgot to look after the river."
The Button Boats
"Later on, people found another use for these shells. Up the Mississippi, in towns like Muscatine, Iowa, factories cut the shiny shells into buttons. Pearl buttons. Before plastic came along, millions of the buttons on people's shirts came from Mississippi River mussels. My own granddaddy worked a clam boat, and every once in a while, he'd open a shell and find a little pearl inside. He kept them in a tobacco tin."
Tyler looked down at the pile of shells with brand-new eyes. Then, very carefully, he picked one up and looked inside.
"Just checking," he said.
Grandpa Earl laughed so hard he nearly fell off the dock.
The Legend and the Truth
In 1857, a large pearl was found in a mussel from Notch Brook near Paterson, New Jersey, by a man named David Howell, but it was ruined because he had cooked the mussels. Soon after, Jacob Quackenbush found a fine pink pearl there and sold it to Charles Tiffany. It was later bought by Empress Eugénie of France and became known as the "Queen Pearl." Its discovery set off an American pearl rush that spread to rivers across the country, destroying many mussel beds.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a pearl button industry, centered in towns like Muscatine, Iowa, used freshwater mussel shells from the Mississippi River system. Natural American freshwater pearls are now rare and treasured by collectors.
đź’ˇ Read more legends and true stories of pearls in The Legends of Pearl.
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