Arkansas: The Only Place in the World Where You Can Dig Up Your Own Diamond

Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, is the only place in the world where the public can search for diamonds at their original volcanic source and keep whatever they find. For a $15 adult admission you can walk onto a 37.5-acre ploughed field — the eroded surface of a roughly 95-million-year-old volcanic pipe — dig, sift and keep absolutely anything you unearth, diamonds included. No licence, no revenue share, no small print. Since the site was first discovered in 1906, more than 75,000 diamonds have come out of that unassuming patch of Arkansas dirt, and visitors have registered over 37,000 of them since the land became a state park in 1972.

We sell lab-grown diamonds for a living, so you might expect us to be sniffy about a muddy field in Pike County. Quite the opposite. If you want to understand why diamonds hold such a grip on the human imagination, there is no better story than this one.

A farmer, a field and two strange stones

In August 1906, a farmer named John Wesley Huddleston spotted two glittering crystals on his property near Murfreesboro that did not look like anything else on his land. They turned out to be diamonds — the first ever verified at their volcanic source anywhere in North America. Huddleston, forever after nicknamed “Diamond John”, sold his farm to mining interests within weeks, reportedly for around $36,000 — a fortune for a Pike County farmer in 1906.

What followed was a genuinely American spectacle: a diamond rush in rural Arkansas. Fortune-hunters flooded into Murfreesboro, mining companies were floated, and for decades various commercial ventures tried — and largely failed — to make the deposit pay at industrial scale. The diamonds were real, but they were too scattered through the rock to mine profitably. In 1972 the State of Arkansas bought the site for $750,000 and did something wonderful with a commercially awkward asset: it opened the diamond field to everyone.

The volcano under the turnips

The reason there are diamonds in Arkansas at all comes down to a single violent event around 95 million years ago. A deep-source volcanic eruption punched up through the crust, carrying diamonds that had formed far down in the Earth's mantle to the surface. The rock it left behind is called lamproite — a rarer cousin of kimberlite, the rock that hosts most of the world's diamond mines. Nearly all of the volcano has since eroded away, leaving its diamond-bearing throat exposed at ground level as a broad, gently dished field.

That geology is what makes the park possible. There is no shaft to sink and no ore to crush; the diamonds simply sit in the weathered soil, and the park ploughs the search area periodically to turn fresh material to the surface. Rain does the rest, washing away lighter dirt and occasionally leaving a clean crystal glinting in the sun. It is the same basic recipe — carbon crystallised under immense heat and pressure — that we recreate in a matter of weeks in a growth chamber, something we explain in detail in our guide to how lab-grown diamonds are made. Nature just took a longer route and a bigger bang.

Uncle Sam, the perfect diamond and a stone called Hope

The field's greatest hits read like folklore, except every one of them is documented.

• The Uncle Sam (1924). Wesley Oley Basham, a worker at the Arkansas Diamond Corporation's short-lived commercial mine, spotted a 40.23-carat rough crystal as ore washed down the plant's wooden sluice — still the largest diamond ever found in the United States. It took its name from Basham's own nickname, and was eventually cut into a 12.42-carat emerald-cut gem with a faint pinkish cast.
• The Strawn-Wagner (1990). Local resident Shirley Strawn found a 3.03-carat rough on the field. Cut in 1997 by Lazare Kaplan to a 1.09-carat round brilliant, it was graded a flawless “0/0/0” — perfect cut, colour and clarity — by the American Gem Society in 1998, the first diamond the AGS lab had ever rated perfect. The State of Arkansas later bought it for $34,700, and it remains on display at the park.
• The Esperanza (2015). Bobbie Oskarson of Colorado had been searching for about twenty minutes when she scooped up an 8.52-carat white crystal. Named Esperanza — Spanish for hope, and also her niece's name — it proved to be D-colour and internally flawless once cut to about 4.6 carats, and was widely described at the time as among the most valuable diamonds ever found in the US.

What we find most striking about these stones is not their size but their quality. Arkansas rough has produced some remarkably clean crystals — a useful reminder that “natural” tells you where a diamond came from, not how fine it is. Grading is what tells you that, which is why every stone we sell carries an IGI report, explained in our IGI certification guide.

People are still finding them

This is not just a historical curiosity — diamonds come out of the field constantly, and the big ones still make the news. In January 2024, Julien Navas, a visitor from Paris, was in the United States to watch a rocket launch in Florida and detoured to Arkansas on a whim. On 11 January he picked a deep chocolate-brown, 7.46-carat diamond straight off the rain-washed surface of the search area, rounded like a marble by millions of years of weathering. It was the largest diamond registered at the park since 2020 and the eighth-largest found since the site became a state park. He named it the Carine, after his fiancée, and said he planned to have it divided into two stones — one for her, one for his daughter.

Most finds are far humbler. Park staff register visitors' diamonds on the spot, and the typical stone is a fraction of a carat — white, brown or yellow, the three colours the field produces. But every one of them is a real diamond, found by an ordinary person, kept without question. Nowhere else in the world offers that.

If you go: honest practical notes

A few things worth knowing before you plan a trip. The search area is a ploughed 37.5-acre field, and it behaves like one: expect mud after rain, dust in high summer, and very little shade in an Arkansas July. Adult admission is $15, children aged six to twelve pay $7, and under-sixes are free. You can bring your own hand tools (nothing motorised or battery-powered) or hire them at the park, where basic digging and sifting kits rent for roughly $5 to $20 a day plus a refundable deposit.

The method most regulars swear by is wet sifting: digging soil, then washing it through stacked screens at the park's water troughs so heavier material — including diamonds — settles where you can spot it. Surface searching after a fresh plough and a hard rain is the other classic tactic, and it is exactly how the Carine was found. Set your expectations honestly, though. The park says visitors find one or two diamonds a day on average, across hundreds or thousands of searchers, and most people go home with sunburn, jasper or quartz rather than a gemstone. That is rather the deal: you are paying $15 for a genuine lottery ticket written in geology, plus a very good day out with your kids.

The field and the growth chamber

We will be honest: most of us will never pull a diamond out of the ground, in Arkansas or anywhere else. The Crater of Diamonds is glorious precisely because it is a long-odds miracle — one field, one ancient volcano, one stone for every few hundred hopeful diggers. That, in a way, is the whole case for growing diamonds. The crystal is identical — carbon, cut and fire — but the odds are removed, along with the mine. If the romance of the Murfreesboro field ever sends you looking at diamonds of your own, our IGI-certified loose diamonds are the same miracle, minus the mud. And should you ever find yourself sifting gravel in Pike County on a hot afternoon, we genuinely hope you beat the odds.