Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Long before pollution, dams and dredging threatened freshwater mussels living in Indiana rivers and streams, the mollusks faced ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. South Dakota native John Latendresse was on a cross-country road trip in 1949 when he found himself at Kentucky Lake in Tennessee.

The rivers of northeast Arkansas once teemed with freshwater mollusks capable of producing pearls, which led to a huge "pearl rush" in the region in the late 1800s. The mussels had not been harvested ...

Fabulous tales of fortunes in 1924, freshwater pearls taken from Mississippi River mussels are still told along the shores of Lake Pepin and in the declining pearl button cities like Muscatine, Iowa.

“Run your hands back and forth through the sediment at the bottom of the river,” says Chuck Work, who has spent much of the last 25 years underwater, crawling the muddy bed of the Tennessee River, ...

A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive cultured pearl product in the market today rivals the quality of the most expensive natural pearls ever found. The price-value anomaly is ...

North American freshwater mussels were first recognized for their commercial value in the 1800s by the American button industry. The mussel’s pearly shell was used for buttons while the meaty interior ...

With the pearl rush of 1864, farmers abandoned their fields, merchants shuttered their stores and the Winooski River teemed with neighbors and strangers as many sought to strike it rich in the waters ...