MAGNET COVE — Down a dirt road off of U.S. 51 in Magnet Cove, a large swath of land has been carved out of the earth. Mounds of rock and heavy machinery dot what seems to be a rather desolate landscape, but it has, in fact, attracted numerous visitors from near and far.
Magnet Cove sits atop a large deposit of novaculite — a sedimentary rock found primarily in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma — and Robert Parker, the proprietor and quarry master of Magnet Cove Stone Co., has welcomed rockhounds, geologists and mineralogists from around the world who come to study the geological features and hunt for nearby minerals.
“We show them the quarry, we let them take samples, and then we take them out and show them the different places to dig for different minerals,” he said. “Then we have what we call flintknappers, who come out here to get materials to make arrowheads.”
Native Americans had long used novaculite for making arrowheads and tools, and today “flintknappers” enjoy making the items with the same primitive methods.
“People who come here to get the flintknapping material, they’re hobbyists or they’re semipros,” Parker said. “People make arrowheads, knives, battle axes, spears. They make their own bows. They take them to trade shows and sell and trade them, and a lot of people do this for a living.”
Flintknapping material is not all that has come out of the quarry, though. Several hundred arrowheads have been found on Parker’s property over the past 50 years.
“It’s strictly by accident,” Parker said. “We’re not hunting them.”
The land on which the quarry is located was homesteaded by Parker’s great-grandfather. It was Parker’s father, however, who started the mining operation back in the early 1960s.
“We actually got into this by accident,” Parker said. “We were cleaning this place off for pasture, and the dozer was getting hung up on these rocks. At that time, we didn’t know what it was. So we got a sample of it and sent it to the state geology department, and they [identified it]. We started tinkering with it, and one thing led to another.”
They started out with one 18-inch saw and started cutting whetstones.
“We cut for uncles and cousins and friends,” he said. “We didn’t really try to sell it at that time.”
Parker was about 16 or 17 when they started finding signs of Native American activity on the land.
“We had a faint idea that Indians were here,” he said.
In addition to a skull and a moccasin, they found what he called “Indian diggings,” which he explained were holes, about the size of a basketball, that went down 2 to 3 feet in the ground.
“What they’d do was, they’d build a fire on flat ground, on top of one of these rocks, pour water on it and fracture it, and then take deer horns and hardwood and pry it up. Then they’d go down farther, and they’d build another fire and fracture it,” he said. “They didn’t have steel tools or anything. They used antlers, or we call them deer horns, and hardwood to do the prying with.”
Novaculite from the Magnet Cove area has been found in Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana and North and South Carolina, he said.
In addition to the large deposit of novaculite, Magnet Cove is rich with a variety of other minerals.
“The reason why that area is so rich in minerals is because you’re dealing with a body of igneous rock that’s about 5 square miles, and it has a large variety of minerals associated with it,” said Mike Howard, geology supervisor and mineralogist for the Arkansas Geological Survey. “Plus, it was in contact with the sedimentary rocks that were in the regions there, and it included the sedimentary rocks of the Ouachita Mountains. There were reactions that took place that caused a great deal of minerals to form in those sedimentary units, too. So you have some unusual chemistry going on there.”
The Arkansas Geological Survey has documented about 100 minerals within Magnet Cove, but self-taught mineralogist Jimmy Matlock of Butterfield estimates there to be more than 130.
“There are a lot of minerals that have been found by local rockhounds and other people that have come in here and have paid the money to have them identified,” Matlock said. “But the state will not recognize them unless you take them and show them where the mineral came from, where they can actually say it came from there, and that is understandable.”
Some of the most common minerals, he said, include pyrite, brookite, rutile, carbonatite and magnetite, but there are also some rare and highly sought minerals, such as eudialyte, perovskite, anatase and rutile eightlings.
Rutile eightlings, Matlock said, feature eight points and are extremely rare.
“As far as I know, Magnet Cove is the only place in the world where rutile crystallizes in the type of a pattern.”
Matlock got into minerals when he was about 18 years old, after moving back to Arkansas. He was born in Malvern but grew up in Texas.
His first Christmas back, he went to cut down a Christmas tree with a friend in an area just north of Magnet Cove.
“We went riding up through the hills, and we got out and walked up this ravine and saw this place that looked like there had been a landslide or something, where the side of the hill just kind of gave away,” Matlock said. “We walked over there and looked, and there were quartz crystals everywhere, and that’s when I got ‘rock pox,’ as we call it.”
Matlock began giving tours about 15 years ago, mostly to areas outside of Magnet Cove because there are no public places within Magnet Cove where people can dig. Then Parker offered to let him bring the groups to his quarry, as well as a few other private properties.
“Living out here, I know just about everybody,” Parker said, “and I have access to land that nobody else has because of that.”
Mineral tours are available by appointment for groups of five or more. Call (501) 844-1727 for more information.