Jack Pearadin, 47, livestreamed his six-carat diamond discovery on TikTok earlier this year, yelling “Holy crap, we got a big one!” as he rinsed gravel from a bucket and flipped the pile onto a table to expose the shiny facets of the 6.03-carat stone.
The Navy reservist, originally from Missouri, has been hunting gems at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas since 2013, moving to nearby Murfreesboro to support his hobby. “I love it that much,” he said. Over more than a dozen years, he has found over 300 gems at the park, though he admits the hobby had not paid off until now.
Pearadin named the yellow diamond the “American Dream” and claims collectors have told him it could be worth $1 million. At least one experienced appraiser said that a diamond of such size and quality could be worth a fourth of that — still an impressive find. “It’s just this massive, gorgeous yellow diamond,” Pearadin said.
Certified gem appraiser Laura Stanley in Little Rock said a typical.17-carat diamond from the park sells for around $700. But a high-quality six-carat yellow diamond from the park can sell for about $250,000, she said, partly because of their origin. “They are their own entity,” Stanley said. “It’s the only place in America where you can go find your own diamond and you can’t compare that to a diamond from anywhere else.”
Nathan Renfro, senior manager at the Gemological Institute of America, said natural diamonds are often cloudy and oddly shaped, losing about 25% of their weight as they are cut and polished into what a jeweler would sell. The US has only two known primary deposits of diamonds — places where columns of once-molten volcanic rock have reached the surface — Crater of Diamonds and Colorado’s Kelsey Lake, where the land was reclaimed after a commercial mining operation went out of business years ago.
“It’s a pretty remarkable operation that that’s available to the public,” Renfro said. “Most diamond mines are super high security.”
Today, that leaves the Arkansas park as one of the only places in the world where anyone can hunt for diamonds and take their finds with them. The park charges a $15 entry fee to fill a 5-gallon bucket with rocks, and people can keep any gemstones they find. Most are small and worth maybe a few hundred dollars.
More than 37,000 diamonds have been discovered since the former open-pit diamond mine became part of a state park in 1972. Most of the 400 to 800 diamonds found at the park annually weigh about a quarter of a carat, according to park interpreter Sarah Bivens.
But there have been some bigger ones, said park assistant superintendent Waymon Cox. In 2020, a 9-carat diamond was found by an Arkansas bank manager. In 2024, a French man unearthed a 7-carat diamond. The largest diamond ever unearthed in the United States, a 40.23-carat stone called the Uncle Sam, was found at the park in 1924. That crystal was cut and polished into a 12.42-carat diamond gifted to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where it is on view in the “Great American Diamonds” exhibit.
Pearadin plans to split the profits with fellow gem hunter Michael Schumacher of Wisconsin, who helped fill the bucket that held the stone, and open his own crystal mine.