Down slippery rocks along a creek in Camden, Tennessee, a small flatbed boat sits anchored in shallow water. It’s used to harvest beautiful pearls from Tennessee River mussels in the bay of Birdsong Resort, Marina and Campground.
John Nerren, known as “Diver John,” has worked at the Tennessee River Freshwater Pearl Farm since the early 1980s.
Though pearls have a rich history dating back thousands of years, the farm is the only one of its kind in all of North America.
“When I first started, [it] might have been a little over 45 [years ago], I was 14. An old Army sergeant gathered up a bunch of us and said, 'Come on, boys, make a living digging clams,’” Nerren said.
The early days of the farm
At that time, the farm was still in its infancy. Only a few years prior, the Keast family — who has owned Birdsong since the early 1960s — was approached with the idea to create it.
“The pearl farm was brought to our attention back in the late ‘70s by a man by the name of John Latendresse, and John had married a Japanese woman right after World War II and brought her to Camden, Tennessee,” Keast said.
Latendresse and his wife, Chessy, had a unique aspiration to produce pearls from the freshwater mollusks that are abundant in many bodies of water throughout North America.
According to Bob Keast, the current owner of the farm and resort, mussel fishing as an industry was booming in Kentucky Lake and surrounding areas as the shells of the mollusks were used to create garment buttons. This type of fishing is known as brailing, with a boat dragging hooks along the waterbed that the mussels grab onto as it passes by them.
Despite the presence of this large industry, culturing pearls with the native mussels was never done, as both the meat and pearl were often seen as just a natural byproduct and discarded.
This was until the Latendresses discovered that the water located in the bay of Birdsong Creek met all the requirements to start a pearl farm.
How the pearls are grown
To start the operation, Chessy used her connections with the pearl industry in Japan to learn optimal culturing techniques to then bring back to Camden.
Keast said these exact methods are still in use today, and they closely resemble those used in larger saltwater operations.
“We implant a piece of foreign material and a piece of material that has come from a live mussel over into another live one, and then we put it in a net, and we hang the net off our PVC water pipe here at Birdsong,” Keast said. “And we wait six or eight years, and it grows a pearl.”
This foreign material that is implanted into the mollusk is a bead which mimics the material needed to begin the pearl creation process.
Pearls naturally form as a byproduct of oysters and mussels after an irritant material, such as a small minnow or parasite, gets trapped inside the shell. When this happens, the mollusks begin to produce a substance called nacre that encapsulates the irritant, protecting the inside shell from possible damage while also creating a beautiful shiny object.
The mussels first have to be gathered from the main water channel and brought back to the farm.
Nerren is in charge of this stage of the process, and at one point he was just one of roughly 80 divers that collected mussels for the farm.
Diving for mussels in Kentucky Lake comes with many challenges, such as low visibility due to lake conditions and the water depth.
“[The mussel will] blend in with the moss, and he'll blend in with the rocks,” Nerren said. “So if this water starts getting a little dark, you just use the very tip end of your fingers, and you rub it back and forth real gently … and you got to discern whether you're hitting a rock or a clam shell.”
After doing this job for nearly 45 years, Nerren said he is now able to tell the species of a mussel purely off touch alone.
“It's kind of like playing the piano,” he said. “You see, after a while, you know what key to hit.”
Nerren and other divers built the PVC pipes used to hang the mussels during the culturing process, as well as the nets they are placed in, when he was only around 15 years old.
Because he’s been a part of this operation since its beginnings, he has seen it evolve over the years. He remembers a time when the farm started to utilize multiple nearby laboratories to create the optimal conditions for pearl growth.
“We had our microscopes, and we had our pH testing kits. We could control the flow of the water in the laboratory with pumps and all kinds of special devices,” he said. “It was state of the art back in the day.”
Preserving the farm’s history
Today, Nerren said there is no longer use for these specially built laboratories as the farm slowly started to scale back operations roughly 20 years ago. After John Latendresse passed away, Keast bought the farm in hopes of preserving the location's unique history.
They still cultivate pearls, just at a lower rate than in previous years when the farm focused on exports. The process is now used to show visitors of the Tennessee River Freshwater Pearl Museum, located on the resort grounds, how the gems are made.
Susan Lewis, who has been in charge of the museum since its opening, can be found doing an array of different tasks on a typical day — ranging anywhere from explaining the history of mussel farming in the region to grading imported and locally grown pearls to be used for crafting jewelry, some of which is made by Nerren.
The bay where the pearls are grown may seem small, but Lewis said its rich history draws in visitors.
“They're in here shopping and trying to learn about the freshwater mussel and the pearl farm, and it's a lot of information. But … I think [people are] hungry for that,” she said.
The most anticipated moment of the tours is when Nerren pries open the mussels that have been resting in the nearby water for years. He carefully cleans the inside before passing it along in a box to eager viewers, giving them a glimpse of the shielded pearls that they will likely not see again — at least on this continent.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky and NPR.
