In the U.S.A. it was John R. Latendresse who began to experiment with pearl culturing in the early sixties. Founding a shell company in 1954 he supplied the Japanese pearl farmers with the best nuclei made out of the mussel shell grown in the Tennessee River. A few years later he founded the American Pearl Co. and imported pearls from Japan. He married a Japanese girl, who had learned the art of pearl culturing. After a long experimenting period with numerous failures at last he could perfect his techniques in the early eighties. Like in case of culturing marine pearls, he also used bead nucleus implanting into the mussel Megalonaias nervosa of the Unionidae family. He harvested the first FWP in 1983. Due to the longer culturing period the nacre layer is usually thicker than in case of saltwater pearls. After his death in 2000 B. Keast purchased the farm. The technique used today in many respects departs from the original Japanese technology and is based on their own researches. Because of longer culturing period the nacre layer is usually thicker than in case of saltwater pearls. One mussel contains five to 8 bead nuclei of different shapes. Due to the use of antibiotics the mortality rate of mussels is one tenth of those in Japan. Americal FWP have the colour of white, pink, silver, lavender and no enhancement is used. Shapes are different: cabachon, marquise, navette, bar, triangle, coin, etc…
American freshwater pearls above and below
