1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (51 page)

W
HERE
: 170 miles north of Little Rock.
G
ASTON’S
W
HITE
R
IVER
R
ESORT
: Tel 870-431-5202;
www.gastons.com
.
Cost:
cottages from $110.
B
EST TIMES
: Jan–Mar for the best brown trout fishing; Mar–Nov for most comfortable weather.

Arkansas’s Most Famous Son

Little Rock, Arkansas

Our 42nd president has always been a bit larger than life, so it’s no surprise that the William J. Clinton Presidential Library Complex is the biggest and most popular of all the presidential libraries in the U.S.
Literally perched over the Arkansas River, the Clinton Presidential Center is a modern architectural masterwork that evokes, by some accounts, both a $165 million double-wide and a Star Wars battle cruiser hovering in flight. (You might be more inclined to agree with the intended symbolism: a bridge to the 21st century.) Highlights of the museum include a life-size replica of the Oval Office, the armored Cadillac limousine used for the second Clinton inauguration, and the sunglasses he wore while playing sax on
The Arsenio Hall Show.
For students of history, there’s a 100-foot-long time line of the Clinton presidency (1993 to 2001), from successes to scandals.

Set in 30-acre Clinton Park on the eastern fringe of downtown Little Rock, the center is no mere repository of papers and memorabilia, but an embodiment of President Clinton’s philosophy of what can be accomplished through good government. On the formerly contaminated site of abandoned warehouses, the center was itself constructed with the latest “green” building materials and techniques. And it has helped spark a renaissance in downtown Little Rock, where a $20 million trolley system links the center to hotels and the bustling River Market District, a restored food hall filled with shops and restaurants on the banks of the Arkansas River. Things really rev up here during the annual RiverFest, a three-day music extravaganza with 100 acts on five stages.

Other stops on the Clinton trail include the Governor’s Mansion and the Old State House Museum, an 1836 Greek Revival structure where Clinton launched both of his presidential bids and which now serves as a museum of
Arkansas history. It’s an easy 50-mile drive to Hot Springs (see p. 394) to pass by three important Clinton touchstones: the house he lived in from age 7; Park Place Baptist Church, which he attended through high school; and the former Hot Springs High School, where he played tenor saxophone in the band (and in a jazz trio called The Three Kings), which now houses artists as the Clinton Cultural Campus.

The William J. Clinton Library and Museum features 2 million photographs, 80 million pages of documents, 21 million e-mail messages, and nearly 80,000 artifacts from Clinton’s presidency.

At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Clinton ended his acceptance speech by saying, “I believe in a place called Hope.” Tucked away in the southwest corner of the state, about 110 miles from Little Rock, the town of Hope is where Clinton had two boyhood homes and attended kindergarten and first grade. The Clinton Birthplace has been restored to look as it did from 1946 to 1950, when he lived there with his grandparents while his mother studied to be a nurse in New Orleans. But Hope is also home to the biggest watermelons in Arkansas (how does 260 pounds sound?) and has been holding a watermelon festival since 1926. These days it’s a food fest with good clean fun like watermelon throwing, seed-spitting, and meloneating contests, along with gospel singing and a dog show to boot. The watermelon is used in the city’s logo: “A Slice of the Good Life.”

WHERE
: 1200 President Clinton Ave. Tel 866-773-7542 or 501-374-4242;
www.clintonlibrary.gov
.
R
IVER
M
ARKET
D
ISTRICT
: Tel 501-375-2552;
www.rivermarket.info
.
GOV ERNOR’S MANSION
: Tel 501-324-9805;
www.arkansasgovernorsmansion.com
.
O
LD
S
TATE
H
OUSE
: Tel 501-324-9685;
www.oldstatehouse.com
.
C
LINTON
B
IRTHPLACE
: Hope. Tel 870-777-4455;
www.clintonbirthplace.org
.
When:
closed Sun.
B
EST TIMES
: late May for RiverFest Arts and Music Festival; mid-Aug for 4-day Hope Watermelon Festival.

Where Old-Time Music Got a New Start

Mountain View, Arkansas

Just when the dogwoods and redbuds burst into bloom, the town square of Mountain View (population 2,876) comes alive with the sound of music—traditional folk tunes with a faint echo of Scotland and Ireland. Someone
announces, “It’s jig time!” and children kick up their heels in a timeless reel imported from across the Pond. During the three-day festival in April, a big stage sits in front of the old stone courthouse for better-known fiddlers and pickers, but groups spring up all over town—on the front porch of a music store, over by the library, in lawn chairs in the square.

Known as the “Folk Music Capital of the World,” Mountain View has hosted this festival since 1963, when Grand Ole Opry star and local boy Jimmy Driftwood (whose monster hit
was “Battle of New Orleans”) came back home to put on a show with local amateur musicians—“timber cutters, farmers, housewives, and all plain people of the hills,” as he said. To everyone’s surprise, 4,000 people showed up, and within a few years 100,000 (mostly hippies and hill folk) were descending on the town during festival weekend. Things have quieted down since then to about 30,000 people, and now the biggest festival in town is the October Beanfest, when one ton of pinto beans are cooked in antique iron pots set up around the courthouse; at noon everyone feasts on beans and corn bread. Beanfest also holds the Great Arkansas Championship Outhouse Race in which teams from Arkansas and states as far as Louisiana and Missouri push outhouses built on wheels in a bid for the coveted gold toilet seat trophy.

The Arkansas Folk Festival and the October Beanfest bookend the season at Ozark Folk Center State Park just a few miles up the road, the only park in America devoted to the preservation of Southern mountain folkways and music. (It opens the same weekend as the Folk Festival, when the public is admitted free.) A living museum of traditional mountain skills such as furniture making and quilting, Ozark Folk Center has both a Crafts Village and a 1,000-seat Music Auditorium; you can see a dulcimer being constructed during the day and then hear live traditional Ozark folk music using similar instruments that evening. Anything after 1941 (when Ernest Tubb launched honky-tonk music with “Walking the Floor over You”) is strictly off-limits to these mostly local musicians. The place really stomps when stars such as Ricky Skaggs, Roy Clark, and Doc Watson are in town.

Another attraction is Blanchard Springs Caverns, an underground world of crystalline formations—sparkling flowstone, towering columns, and delicate soda straws. Choose your adventure: the Dripstone Trail (the easiest and prettiest), the Discovery Trail (best for learning how caves are formed), or the Wild Cave Tour (scrambling in sections that have no stairways or lights).

W
HERE
: 105 miles north of Little Rock.
Visitor info:
Tel 888-679-2859 or 870-269-8068;
www.yourplaceinthemountains.com
.
OZARK FOLK CENTER STATE PARK
: Tel 870-269-3851;
www.ozarkfolkcenter.com
.
When:
Wed–Sat, mid-Apr–Sept; closed Mon, Oct; closed Nov–mid-Apr.
Cost:
$25 for 1-day family pass to Crafts Village; concerts extra.
B
LANCHARD
S
PRINGS
C
AVERNS
: Tel 888-757-2201 or 870-757-2211;
www.fs.fed.us/oonf/ozark/recreation/caverns.html
.
When:
closed Mon–Tues, Oct–Mar.
Cost:
$65 for Wild Cave Tour.
B
EST TIMES
: 3rd weekend in Apr for Folk Festival; last full weekend in Oct for Beanfest; spring for the dogwoods; fall for foliage.

In Search of All That Glitters

Murfreesboro, Arkansas

It’s no guaranteed get-rich-quick scheme, but a few people
have
gotten lucky at the Crater of Diamonds, the only place in the world where the public can search for diamonds where they naturally occur—and keep them. Fabulous
finds include the Strawn-Wagner Diamond, the most perfect diamond ever certified by the American Gem Society and on permanent display at the visitors center. Unearthed in 1990
by local resident Shirley Strawn, the 1.09-carat diamond (3.03 in the rough) was valued at $37,000 when it was cut. Diamonds (and 40 other rocks, minerals, and semiprecious stones like jasper, amethyst, and garnet) can be found in this 37-acre plowed field because of movements in the earth’s plates. About 95 million years ago a crack in the earth’s crust allowed a plume of hot magma to escape, creating a “volcanic pipe” that brought diamonds to the surface. It is the world’s eighth-largest diamond-bearing deposit in surface area.

Geologists noticed the peridotite soil in the 19th century, but not until 1906 were the first diamonds found by John Huddleston, a local farmer. The site was mined in the early years, but proved more valuable as a tourist attraction starting in 1949. Since Arkansas purchased the land in 1972 to develop it as a state park, more than 25,000 diamonds have been found here.

No luck yet—a diamond hunter examines a large quartz rock at the Crater of Diamonds.

There are three ways to look for diamonds. After a good hard rain, just walking back and forth and keeping your eye peeled can work. Serious rock hounds dig deep trenches and follow a painstaking process called sluicing. But most rookie visitors just dig around in the first 6 inches of soil (you can bring your own trowels and screens or rent them at the visitors center) and pray for beginner’s luck. It helps to know what you’re looking for: a small polished stone, translucent but not necessarily clear, with a metallic luster and a slightly oily feel. The Diamond Discovery Center offers digging tips and free rock identification, and will weigh and certify your diamonds. An average of two diamonds a day are found (you generally will hear lots of whooping when that happens).

The largest diamond ever found in America came out of the Crater of Diamonds, a monster white diamond called “Uncle Sam,” found in 1924: It was 40.23 carats (12.42 carats after being cut). The 15.33-carat “Star of Arkansas” wasn’t bad pickin’s either. Although most of the diamonds unearthed here are about the size of a paper match head—so small they would not be cut—that shouldn’t stop you from dreaming.

W
HERE
: 125 miles southwest of Little Rock; 209 State Park Rd. Tel 870-285-3113;
www.craterofdiamondsstatepark.com
.

Just Don’t Call the Winner a Quack

Stuttgart, Arkansas

Every Thanksgiving duck hunters converge on the small town of Stuttgart for the World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest, first held in 1936 and now the world’s largest competition of its kind. A major stop on
the Mississippi Flyway, a superhighway for mallards and other waterfowl, Stuttgart calls itself the Rice and Duck Capital of the World. No coincidence, since ducks are attracted to the rice fields of Arkansas County, the biggest rice producer in the state (responsible for 40 percent of the country’s rice production) thanks to the rich “gumbo soil” of the Delta that holds water while the hardpan underneath keeps it from draining away. Located near the convergence of three major rivers (the White, Arkansas, and Mississippi), Stuttgart is also at the heart of marshy open fields that create ideal conditions for duck hunters.