Celebrating the discovery of diamonds in Pike County!

This event commemorates the discovery of diamonds in 1906 by John Wesley Huddleston at what is now the Crater of Diamonds State Park with treasure hunts and games all day long!

(taken from the writings of Howard Millar)

John Huddleston was a tall man, standing well over 6 feet. Long arms and huge hands gave him the appearance of great strength. His thick black mustache helped hide a hair-lip and speech impairment which made him shy of strangers.

John was the son of a local sharecropper and grew up an illiterate farmer himself, yet still quite intelligent. Roaming and prosepecting the countryside along the Little Missouri River occupied many of his idle hours. During this time, he became a very proficient hunter, fisherman and herbalist.

Early in 1906, John bought the 160 acre McBayer farm to make a home for his wife and children. It was this tract of land that was destined to contain part of the Crater's diamond bearing kimberlite.

The owners asked $1,000 with a $100 down payment. John didn't have $100 so he offered them his mule, which they accepted assuming it would be clear profit. Little did they know that he would soon sell the land for $36,000 and be known as the "Diamond King".

August 8, 1906 was the fateful day for John Huddleston:

"I had been putting out rock salt in several places where my hogs ran wild and there was some black gumbo soil. This soil had small flakes of a gold colored mineral, but they were too small to pick up. So I picked up handfuls of this black dirt until I had all i could wash in my gold pan, then went down to the creek bed and washed it.

The little gold flakes I thought were gold floated to the top of the water, so I knew it was not gold. Among the gravel in the bottom of the pan were two pretty crystals, one yellow and one white, that looked different from any quartz crystal I had ever seen.

I tried to grind a spot on the two bright rounded pebbles, but only made a narrow groove in the face of my grinding wheel. The clerk had told me it was made from materials that was so hard it would cut anything but a diamond, so I was sure these two strange little crystals were diamonds."

John pronounced the word diamonds as "deemints". These stones were later sent to a Little Rocke jeweler who verified the fact that they were genuine diamonds!

One weighed 3.0 carats, white, and the other was 1.42 carats, yellow.

Although he was the one-time owner of a diamond mine, John met with several misfortunes in his life and died as an impoverished man. He is buried in Japany Cemetery, about three miles from the Diamond Mine, with a headstone donated by the citizens of Murfreesboro.

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