The Market Place of Pearls

Shell outlasted the pearls. Tennessee's first pearl excitement followed a reported find on the Caney Fork around 1876, and searching spread to every major river. Mussels also fed button factories, among them Weber and Sons at Savannah, which ran into the 1980s. In 1947 Japanese pearlers imported a barge-load of Tennessee River mussels for cultured pearls, and in the 1960s that market revived musseling, with some twelve hundred commercial licenses issued each year. Shellers worked by toe-digging in shallows or dragging brails along the bottom.

What the plaque says

The Market Place of Pearls From about 1895 to 1936 Tennessee was one of the nation's six leading states in marketing pearls. Clinton was listed as one of three Tennessee towns known as centers of the pearling industry. New York dealers came regularly to Clinton during the pearling season. Saturdays were trading days for pearl hunters and buyers. In 1900 Clinch River pearls were featured at the Paris, France, Exposition.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 0.5 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 6.5 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.
• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 8.7 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 9.2 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.

More markers nearby

• The Rev. Paul W. Turner — steps away
• Clinton High School — 0.2 mi
• First Integrated Public Schools in the Southeast — 2.7 mi
• David Hall Cabin — 5.0 mi