Crystal Springs, Arkansas

Everything Crystal Springs is known for

1 song mention this city 0 artists from here

Music in Crystal Springs

Songs About Crystal Springs

Ouachita Wind
Brother and The Hayes
20%

Artists From Crystal Springs

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History of Crystal Springs

The Mountains That Sharpen the World's Knives RoadyGoat

1818

The mountains around Hot Springs are made of a rock you've probably never heard of, yet it may have sharpened the knife in your kitchen drawer. It's called novaculite, an ultra-fine quartz stone that geologists say is found nowhere else in the world. Crush it under a microscope and the grains are almost impossibly small, just a few millionths of a meter across, which makes it the perfect natural sharpening surface. People have quarried it here for thousands of years, and the modern whetstone trade took off back in eighteen eighteen. Chefs, woodcarvers, barbers, and surgeons have all reached for a genuine Arkansas stone, and the state remains the country's number-one source of these abrasives. So those scenic ridges aren't just pretty. They're a global hardware store for putting an edge on steel.

15.3 mi away

The Crystal That Keeps Your Watch on Time RoadyGoat

The hills near Hot Springs hide one of the world's great treasures of clear quartz crystal, and the town of Mount Ida just up the road calls itself the Quartz Crystal Capital of the World. Roughly ninety-nine percent of the quartz mined in the United States comes out of this corner of Arkansas, in veins that can run sixty feet wide. But quartz isn't just pretty. It's secretly an engineer. Quartz is piezoelectric, meaning squeeze it and it makes a tiny electric charge, and feed it electricity and it vibrates at a perfectly steady beat. That heartbeat is exactly what keeps a quartz watch ticking and what times the chips inside your phone and computer. So those glittering crystals coming out of the Arkansas ground are the same mineral keeping the modern world on schedule.

15.5 mi away

Bathhouse Row and the Gangster Truce RoadyGoat

Hot Springs sits in a Ouachita Mountains valley fed by some forty-seven thermal springs, water that fell as rain millennia ago, sank thousands of feet, got superheated, and now surfaces near 143 degrees. The federal government moved to protect those springs unusually early: Congress set aside Hot Springs Reservation in 1832, making it the oldest land in what became the National Park System, decades before Yellowstone, though it wasn't formally renamed Hot Springs National Park until 1921. By the late 1800s grand bathhouses lined Bathhouse Row downtown, and visitors came from everywhere to soak. The same easygoing, look-the-other-way town also became a famous gangster getaway in the 1920s and '30s, neutral ground where mobsters from Chicago and New York mixed at the baths and the racetrack. Al Capone reportedly favored Suite 443 at the Arlington Hotel and sometimes booked the whole fourth floor. Spa town and outlaw hideout, soaking side by side.

15.9 mi away

Bathhouse Row

1832

Eight ornate bathhouses along Central Avenue in Hot Springs, built between 1892 and 1923, forming the centerpiece of the oldest federal reserve in the United States.

16.0 mi away

Everything Near Crystal Springs

25 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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