Utilizing the "Worthless" Animal: The Musseling Industry of the Ohio River

Shells, to most of us, merely are shells—a creation of nature that it was thought could never be destroyed.

—Indianapolis News, March 17, 1928

In 1847, a fortunate man in Notch Brook, New Jersey, discovered a valuable pearl in a freshwater mussel. News of this discovery and the pearl's $2,500 price tag spread throughout the country, generating frenzy. Between 1847 and the Civil War, New York's markets alone sold approximately $15,000 worth of freshwater pearls, but the war stifled these endeavors. This industry was not gone forever, however; fishermen discovered many fine pearls in Ohio's Little Miami River, a tributary to the Ohio River in 1868, and just eight years later in a stream in Waynesville, Ohio. Excitement grew, and a "pearl mania" swept the nation. By the 1880s, a pearl fever grasped the American Midwest with the "same spirit of the gold seeker of 1849." Thousands of visitors, many with no familiarity or attachment to the Ohio Valley environment that housed mussel beds, flocked to creeks and rivers to gather mussels in pursuit of pearls. The fever waned in some areas as mussel beds became exhausted and localities were "cleaned out," but it would simply pick up again in new bodies of water. For many areas, the result was a "wholesale destruction" of mussels.¹

Unio Verrucosa. Bivalve Shells of the Ohio River by C.S. Rafinesque (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1832).

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Along the Ohio–Mississippi system and its tributaries, fishermen rediscovered freshwater pearls in mussels known as Unionids, the most common native mollusks in the Ohio River. Musseling was not new to the Ohio Valley; Native Americans had fished for mussels long before European arrival and settlement. However, nineteenth-century settlers traditionally viewed these round, black or brown, heavy-shelled mollusks as a valueless waste animal, as they were too tough to be used for human consumption. Thus, mussels reproduced relatively undisturbed for over a century. For many settlers, perhaps the creatures' only redeeming characteristics were the insides of their shells, which sported superb colors of white, pink, or blue, and their potential for making pearls. In terms of riparian ecology, though, mussels are far from a waste, and their extensive removal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a lasting impact in the Ohio Valley.²

Cities and their manufacturing grew out of the Ohio River's natural resources and powerful flow. Over the decades, the freshwater pearl seekers and pearl button industries increasingly extracted the necessary natural filter animals from the environment. Humans, nevertheless, continued to believe they could manipulate and control the fauna of the Ohio River and the river itself without consequence. During this critical period, dredging and channelization efforts shaped the river and put its animals at risk for survival. Industry accelerated the destruction of the critical mussel population and, consequently, further sped the deterioration of the river's health. Nevertheless, most people did not recognize the connection until the 1930s, when knowledge that had been accumulated to save a previously thriving pearl and button industry contributed to conservation efforts.

The mussels' story, therefore, provides insight on how conservation took form in the Ohio Valley outside the framework of beautification efforts. The musseling industry illuminates the connection between the interests of urban businesspeople and those of early conservationists. The business and environmental concerns worked together. As industry grew to depend on the mussels, the knowledge developed to ensure longevity of an industry encouraged river conservation efforts. Brian Balogh and Hendrik Hartog have shown this connection through the history of law and regulations. There is a practical end, in that it was simply in business's direct interests to funnel investments toward conservation. Thus, as Richard Andrews points out in his work, it was in the US government's best interest to do so as well. However, concerned parties were interested not in preserving the thriving Ohio River in its entirety but rather in the continued production of one of its native animals, the Unionids. This may strike us...