ARArkansas Fun Facts

Arkansas runs the only diamond site on Earth where the public can dig and keep whatever they pull out of the dirt. Crater of Diamonds State Park near Murfreesboro sits on an eroded volcanic pipe, charges an admission fee, hands you a shovel and lets you walk away with the stones. Visitors find several hundred diamonds in a typical year, and the state has never asked for a cut.

Facts most people get wrong

• Walmart was not founded in Bentonville. Sam Walton opened the first Walmart Discount City in Rogers on July 2, 1962. Bentonville has the headquarters and the original Walton's Five and Dime, which is a different store from a different decade.
• Arkansas is not flat. Only the eastern third is Delta farmland. The Ozarks fill the north and the Ouachitas fill the west, and Mount Magazine reaches 2,753 feet.
• Hot Springs is not the oldest national park. Congress protected the springs as a federal reservation in 1832, forty years before Yellowstone, but the land did not become a national park until 1921. First protected is not the same as first designated.
• Bill Clinton was not born in Little Rock. He was born in Hope in 1946 and named William Jefferson Blythe III after his father, who died in a car crash before the birth. He took his stepfather's surname as a teenager in Hot Springs.
• The final s is not silent by accident. The state legislature settled the pronunciation by resolution in 1881 because its own two senators said the name differently on the Senate floor.
• The Arkansas River loses the state pronunciation upstream. The same river that is the ARK-an-saw in Little Rock is widely called the ar-KAN-zas once it crosses into Kansas, where the Kansa name it shares is said the local way.

Records and firsts

• Arkansas grows roughly half of all rice produced in the United States, more than any other state, and has led the country for decades.
• The Uncle Sam diamond, 40.23 carats, was found at the Murfreesboro site in 1924 and remains the largest diamond ever unearthed in the United States.
• Hot Springs National Park protects 47 thermal springs that surface at about 143 degrees Fahrenheit and feed the bathhouses on Central Avenue.
• The Buffalo River became the first national river in the country in 1972, which stopped a dam project and left 135 miles undammed.
• Walmart, headquartered in Bentonville since 1970, is the largest company in the world by revenue.
• Mines around the town of Bauxite supplied nearly all of the aluminum ore used by the United States during the Second World War.

Geography that surprises

• The Ouachita Mountains run east to west, which almost no other North American range does. Most fold belts on the continent trend north to south.
• Arkansas touches six states, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma, more neighbors than most states its size.
• The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 dropped chunks of the northeast corner below the water table, creating sunk lands and Big Lake that are still swamp today.
• The Mississippi River forms the eastern border and keeps moving, so old meander cutoffs have left pieces of Arkansas stranded on the Tennessee and Mississippi banks.
• Elevation runs from 55 feet in the southeast lowlands to 2,753 feet at Mount Magazine, the high point of the Interior Highlands between the Appalachians and the Rockies.

Where the name comes from

Arkansas is a French spelling of an Illinois language word, akansa, which was the name the Illinois people used for the Quapaw who lived at the mouth of the Arkansas River. French explorers wrote down what their Illinois guides called the tribe rather than what the Quapaw called themselves. The trailing s is a French plural marker, which is why it was never meant to be pronounced.

Kansas descends from a related name for the Kaw people, recorded by English speakers instead of French ones. That is the whole reason two states spelled almost identically are said completely differently. The Arkansas legislature made the split official in 1881, resolving that the name is pronounced in three syllables with the final s silent and the accent on the first syllable.

Bordering states

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