6 of the Quirkiest Towns in Arkansas
Eureka Springs built its streets to wander the hillsides, so good luck finding a right angle or a traffic light anywhere downtown. In Murfreesboro, you can dig a real diamond out of a plowed field and take it home, no questions asked. Calico Rock shares a zip code with a ghost town, and Jasper paid for its elk herd in catfish. None of that is made up. These six Arkansas towns crank the weird wide open, each in its own gloriously different direction.
Eureka Springs
Eureka Springs built itself around more than 60 natural springs in northwest Arkansas. So many staircases connect its hillside streets that locals call it the Stairstep Town. Victorian storefronts climb the slopes above. At the top stands the 1886 Crescent Hotel, which bills itself as America's most haunted. It owes that to its strangest tenant. In 1937 a con man named Norman Baker bought the place and operated it as a fake cancer hospital. He wore lilac suits, drove a purple car, and had no medical degree. Authorities shut him down within a couple of years. A 2019 dig outside turned up bottles of his bogus cure. His autopsy table still occupies the basement. The hotel happily works it into the nightly ghost tours.
A few miles west, Thorncrown Chapel goes gentler. Architect E. Fay Jones finished the glass-and-timber sanctuary in 1980 under one rule. No piece could be bigger than what two people could carry through the woods. The result rises 48 feet on 425 windows. Closer to town, the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge gives 459 acres to big cats and bears pulled from the exotic pet trade. A Bengal tiger and a haunted hotel end up a few miles apart in the same town.
Calico Rock
Calico Rock has a ghost town for a next-door neighbor. The two even share a zip code. The living town began in the 1820s as a White River steamboat landing in north-central Arkansas. The striped sandstone bluff over the water reminded somebody of calico fabric. That is exactly where the name came from.
The old main strip survives nearly intact, down to Peppersauce Alley, a narrow 1923 lane wedged between the buildings. Right next door, the East Calico Historic District has been left as a partial ghost town, open for self-guided and ranger-led walks. The Calico Rock Museum lays out the steamboat and timber years. That past is how a place this small wound up with a ghost town to spare.
Jasper
Jasper has about 470 people and a full-blown elk festival. Every June the Buffalo River Elk Festival takes over the Newton County courthouse square. That is a lot of fuss over an animal Arkansas lost in the 1840s. The elk came back in 1981. The state trucked them in from Colorado and paid, oddly enough, in Arkansas channel catfish.
The herd grazes the Boxley Valley meadows about 15 miles west, along the Buffalo National River. Crowds line the road every fall during the rut. Nearby, somebody looked at a roadside pullout over the Big Creek valley and named it the Arkansas Grand Canyon. Newton County is not big on understatement.
Paris
Yes, Arkansas has a Paris. No, there is no Eiffel Tower. What it has is the tallest mountain in the state, right in its backyard. Mount Magazine rises to 2,753 feet just south of town. Plenty of people drive up just to jump off it. The flat summit is a hang-gliding launch, where gliders ride the updrafts off the bluff.
Downtown plays it straighter, mostly. Two small museums dig into the coal-mining past. One is set inside the old 1886 county jail, cells still upstairs. Then there is the wine. Cowie Wine Cellars, out on Highway 22, makes its bottles from Cynthiana, a native American grape. A French-named coal town with its own winery feels about right here.
Mountain View
Mountain View calls itself the Folk Music Capital of the World. It has the nightly evidence to back that up. On most warm evenings, musicians show up at the Stone County Courthouse Square with fiddles, banjos, and guitars and play until they feel like stopping. Nobody schedules it. Anyone with an instrument can join in. Anyone without one finds a spot and listens. About 2,900 people live here, in the Ozark foothills of north-central Arkansas.
The tradition has a permanent home at the Ozark Folk Center State Park, where craftspeople still demonstrate blacksmithing, broom making, and dulcimer building. Each April the Arkansas Folk Festival takes over downtown with parades, crafts, and competitions. In the warmer months the music spills past the square into Pickin' Park, where players trade tunes in small circles. The whole place is built on the idea that a song is better when a stranger joins in.
Murfreesboro
Murfreesboro is a small Pike County town with the only diamond site on earth where the public digs and walks off with what it finds. The Crater of Diamonds looks like an ordinary plowed field. It is the worn-down top of an ancient volcano. Anyone can rent a shovel and a bucket, pick a row, and start sifting. Whatever turns up is yours, diamonds included.
A farmer named John Huddleston found the first stones here in 1906. He was not even looking for diamonds. Word got out. A diamond rush followed. The state took over the field in 1972 and has operated it as a park ever since. The biggest find came in 1924, a 40.23-carat stone called Uncle Sam. It is still the largest diamond ever found in the United States. People still pull them out today. The park averages a couple of diamonds a day, so the odds are not as silly as they sound.
Where the Strange Feels Normal
The Crescent Hotel sells out ghost tours built around a real-life quack. Somehow that is one of the tamer stories here. On most nights in Mountain View, strangers gather on the courthouse square to play music together. Paris launches hang gliders off the highest peak in Arkansas and bottles wine from a grape almost nobody grows. None of it was planned. That is the appeal. These towns turned strange by accident, then leaned all the way in.
