Word: murfreesboro
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...diamond season at Murfreesboro, Ark., opened early this spring when word got around that Fred Wood, a sawmill worker from Chidester. had found a ten-carat stone. It ought to bring $8,000, says Wood, and it is not the only diamond that he has found. "I don't do no digging,'' he says. "I just walk and look." He plans to name his find the Orval E. Faubus diamond, for his state's Governor...
Glittering Pebble. A few diamonds have been found in other parts of the U.S., but they are considered freaks, probably carried long distances by rivers or glaciers. The Murfreesboro diggings-at best a poor relation of the famous diamond "pipes"' of South Africa-are genuine. Ages ago, a volcano must have erupted in what is now Arkansas. Presumably that geologic hiccup eventually resulted in an impressive cone, but hundreds of millions of years of erosion wore it down. The only remnants were traces of the lava that once filled the volcano's vent. The lava was kimberlite, named...
Those that remain today seem to be concentrated in 65 acres of land set in the piney woods 3½ miles from Murfreesboro (pop. 1,100). The field first became prominent in 1906 when a young guide, John Wesley Huddleston, picked up a glittering pebble after a rainstorm. When a Little Rock jeweler pronounced it a genuine high-quality diamond, a rush of buggy-borne diggers, many of them women in ground-sweeping skirts, swarmed into Murfreesboro. Few of them found diamonds, and most of them soon went home. But ever since then, the diggings have been a steady tourist...