THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And its one you have probably never heard of or thought about. Tennessee's pearl industry is losing markets and can't fight the competition for the ones that remain.Pearl diving is a vocation that has been shaped by the poor visibility and dirt that characterize the Tennessee River. “The river bottom can be sandy, rocky, or muddy,” another pearl-guide poster who calls himself “Mikeyy” reports on the forum. “The current may be stronger in some places than in others.” A diver named Bennie Woods told Alabama’s Times Daily that being a mussel diver “can get pretty scary at times. A lot of time when you are probing around a stump looking for shells, there will be a giant catfish hiding under the stump.… If you are diving near the barge channel you can hear the screws of the tow boats turning as they pass you by.” Unlike Japan’s Mikimoto Pearl Island, where white-clad ama divers — traditional free divers who are women — perform hourly for the visiting crowds, the life of the Tennessee River diver, always difficult and now increasingly without rewards, is not for tourists.

As Tennessee’s divers dwindle, China has, in recent years, become the leading exporter of cultured pearls, flooding the market with what many consider to be a lower-quality product and hastening the demise of the Tennessee shell industry. The key difference between Chinese pearl farms and those of other countries is the process by which they nucleate their pearls: The Chinese pearl farms have found a way to irritate their mussels without a shell nucleus, using instead only mussel tissue. Tissue nucleation, an effective cost-cutting measure, is now being imitated by farms in other countries, leading to an overall decline in American shell exportation.

The repercussions of the Chinese pearl farms’ self-sufficiency have begun to be felt in Camden. There is a distinct feeling that what was once a boomtown is now a bust: The city, which has experienced steady population growth since 1850, reported a decline between the 2000 and 2010 U.S. censuses.

A mural on the side of the United States Pearl Company, a pearl wholesaler headquartered in downtown Camden, welcomes visitors to “Benton County, Pearl Capitol [sic] of the U.S.A.” The building’s windows are tightly shuttered.

The U.S. Pearl Company (USPC) is owned by James Peach, a former member of the Tennessee House of Representatives who started out as a fisherman and pearl farmer, credits himself on Twitter as the “key person in blocking Gov. [Ned] McWerther from enacting a state income tax.” Peach confirmed via email that “the shell industry has been [in] decline since 1995, consequently, natural pearls have been on [the] same decline.… The increased production of tissue-pearl production in Asia has had a very big impact.”

Today the only freshwater pearl-culturing farm in the U.S. is owned by a man named Bob Keast and located on a resort 15 minutes from Camden proper.