Finding Opportunity Wherever You Are: Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell

What a guy, this Russell Conwell, who packed a whole lot of accomplishments into his 82 years.

He was born to farmers in South Worthington, Massachusetts in 1843, and seemed to have grown up a smarty-pants who wanted to make a difference because he enlisted in the Union Army right before graduated from Yale University in 1862. It took some convincing for his abolitionist father to let him go off to war, and young Russell joined the 27th Massachusetts Volunteers, affectionately called the “Mountain Boys.” Russ was wounded in battle and made captain before long.

In 1863, the captain went to travel to Newberne, North Carolina to try and get his soldiers paid, but it turned out that he did not have permission to be absent from his post, and Confederate soldiers ended up attacking his spot. He was arrested for allegedly deserting his team, presumably reinstated, and was re-assigned to Nashville, Tennessee in June 1864. Russell fought in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and broke his arm and shoulder from an exploding artillery shell.

He was not able to fully recover well enough from the injury to continue serving, so he retired and despite the arrest, Russell received an honorable discharge. He then enrolled at Albany Law School and kept himself busy lawyering and writing biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and James A. Garfield. By 1880, though, Russell Conwell was an ordained Baptist minister overseeing a congregation in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Turns out Conwell was a pretty charismatic pulpit-beater because this guy named Alexander Reed heard Russell preach in Lexington and being the leader of the Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia, Alexander invited Conwell to Philly to be the pastor there. Conwell was such a hit that they quickly outgrew the new church they had built.

So yeah they had designs on building a brand-new church. There’s this story about a little girl named Hattie May Wiatt who wandered around Philadelphia that Conwell took a liking to, and she had to sit in the back because wouldn’t you know it, the church was just that packed to see Conwell. The pastor apparently promised her that a new church would be built big enough to hold all of the children but unfortunately, the child died when she was six years old. As the story goes, young Hattie May left behind fifty-seven cents that was to go toward building the new church.

Who knows if this story about Hattie May is even true or not, but Russell Conwell saw an opportunity nevertheless. He had the fifty-seven cents converted to fifty-seven pennies and told his congregation the inspiring and heartbreaking yet heartwarmingly tragic tale of young six-year-old Hattie May Wiatt. He auctioned off all the individual pennies, and ended up getting like $250 for them, which would be close to about $9,000 today.

With that dough burning a hole in Conwell’s pocket, they went to a house on the corner of Broad and Berks in Philadelphia, so-called The Temple because the property owner did not want the building to be known as a church. The congregation ended up purchasing the house in 1886 — with the very first payment being a symbolic 57 cents — and the next year in that very house, the very first classes for what would eventually be Temple University were held.

The spot gained momentum from there, gathering public support and enthusiasm for its youth groups. As its numbers grew and Conwell started mentoring young deacons, he becoming president of the college, spearheading the growth that has made Temple University the force and educational institution it is today.

Acres of Diamonds began as a speech that Russell wrote in 1869, long before he was invited to pastor up the church in Philadelphia. It’s supposedly based on an anecdote where Russ went to the Middle East and heard a story about a man who sold his property and went looking for diamonds, only to find out that the property he sold had diamonds underneath the whole time. The premise is that you don’t have to look very far to get your riches on, and everything you’ll need to be successful is right in your own community. 



As a book, Acres of Diamonds was first published in 1890, and as a speech, Russell Conwell would deliver it more than 6,100 times before he passed away in 1925.

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Cover Image Credit: Background image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay. The original cover image of Russell Herman Conwell is circa 1904 and authorship is credited to R. Campbell Tibb and Henry W. Ruoff. The photo is also part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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