Winter has arrived. The tourists are gone and it's quiet atop Petit Jean Mountain this morning.
I took scenic Arkansas 10 and Arkansas 9 from my home in west Little Rock, exited Arkansa 9 at Oppelo and headed west on Arkansas 154, leaving the flat pastures along the Arkansas River behind for the climb up the mountain.
Outside of a staff member, I have the wonderful new visitors' center at Petit Jean State Park to myself. It's another facility that leads me to say "thank you" to the slim majority of voters who approved Amendment 75 to the Arkansas Constitution in November 1996. That amendment added an eighth of a cent to the sales tax for conservation purposes. Of that money, 45 percent goes for improvements at state parks.
During the past quarter century, we've gone from holding things up with duct tape to perhaps the finest state parks system in the country. The T.W. Hardison Visitor Center is a prime example of what the state has been able to do with the money. The new center stands on the site of Hardison Hall, which also was named for the man who led efforts to make this the first state park.
For many visitors to Petit Jean, it will be their initial stop on the mountain and make a good first impression. There are interpretive exhibits, a gift shop, space for special exhibits, offices and meeting rooms. It's where campers must register. The center has large windows that allow visitors to look at Lake Bailey.
When the visitors' center was dedicated last April, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said the mountain was a refuge for him during the worst of the pandemic. Any visitor to this mountain can see why the late Gov. Winthrop Rockfeller--a man with the means to live anywhere in the world--chose to make it home the final two decades of his life.
"Our park system is the crown jewel of the tourism industry in Arkansas," Hutchinson says. "Everything hinges upon it. . . . It's a source of pride for us nationally."
In 1832, Washington Irving wrote: "Petit Jean Mountain on the Arkansas--a picturesque line of waving highlands--of mingled rock and cliff and wood, with far bottom below."
During the 1853 U.S. Pacific Railroad Survey, German artist Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen created a woodcut depiction of the mountain to accompany the report.
"A relatively flat top gives Petit Jean elevations that vary from about 750 feet above sea level to a high point of 1,207 feet above sea level, or nearly 1,000 feet above the Arkansas River Valley," Donald Higgins writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "Shaped roughly like a bird's head, the mountaintop stretches about 5.5 miles from east to west and 2.6 miles from north to south.
"Cedar Creek flows east to west down the center of the mountaintop, draining it and giving it a bowl-like quality. At Cedar Falls, the creek tumbles off a 70-foot precipice and then meanders through Cedar Creek Canyon into the Petit Jean River to the west. According to geologists, the reason for the existence of the 8,800-acre plateau is that the top of the mountain itself was once a valley."
Higher elevations to the north and south eroded away millions of years ago, leaving the mountain as an erosional remnant due to its sandstone and shale.
"Evidence of Native American occupation extends back some 10,000 years, and the mountain boasts nearly 100 documented archaeological sites, including Arkansas' largest concentration of aboriginal rock art on its outcrops and in its rock shelters," Higgins writes. "The discovery of cultivated plant motifs in the rock art suggests that Native Americans farmed the mountaintop within the last millennium.
"Petit Jean rock art designs appear similar to those painted on pottery found among the extensive Mississippian Period deposits in Carden Bottom, just off the west end of the mountain, implying a cultural connection between the two areas. Petit Jean was a landmark noted by early white explorers of the Arkansas River. Mentions of the mountain by Thomas Nuttall in 1819, government surveyor Henry Downs in 1821 and the Arkansas Gazette in 1821 have the name as Petit John."
Nuttall, an English botanist and zoologist who lived in America from 1808-41, wrote: "Towards the southern extremity of the river which I ascended, there are several enormous masses of rocks so nicely balanced as almost to appear the work of art; one of them, like the druidical monuments of England, rocked backwards and forwards on the slightest touch."
Hardison, an expert on the mountain's history, contended that the first white settler on Petit Jean was a political refugee named Jean La Caze, who fled the French Revolution in 1790 with his wife and son Petit Jean.
"Immigrants reported that La Caze died around 1820, and another quarter century passed before John Walker brought his family from Tennessee and began to farm the center of the mountain," Higgins writes. "In the 1850s, after the Walkers moved away, Owen West and his family occupied Walker's hand-hewn log cabin."
There were just five families living atop the mountain at the start of the Civil War. The coming of the railroad between Little Rock and Fort Smith after the war changed that. Railroad officials advertised heavily for settlers, including ads in Europe.
"With the encouragement of Morrilton boosters, Michael Broun built Petit Jean's first resort hotel in 1889," Higgins writes. "Benefiting from offers of cheap railroad land, a German-American Lutheran colony called Wittenberg arose on the mountain in the mid-1880s. Petit Jean claimed 100 family farms by 1900. . . . Small farm agriculture and orchards flourished on Petit Jean.
"By the late 1920s, a crash in cotton prices, droughts, blight and insect infestations, combined with poor soil management practices, took a toll on family farms. Petit Jean's population decreased, making land available for other uses. The Arkansas Young Men's Christian Association established a camp on the eastern end of the mountain in 1920 on property that had been apple orchards."
Hardison worked as a physician for Fort Smith Lumber Co. He made house calls on the mountain and in surrounding areas from 1908 until shortly before his death in 1957. After he died, his ashes were scattered atop the mountain from a plane.
Fort Smith Lumber Co. officials decided it was too expensive to log the Seven Hollows and canyon areas of the mountain. Hardison headed a campaign to convince the federal government to turn the land into a national park. In 1921, Stephen Mather, the National Park Service director, told Hardison the parcel was too small for a national park. He urged Hardison to convince legislators to make it a state park instead.
Hardison was successful in that effort. In 1923, Petit Jean State Park was established.
"Depopulation during the Great Depression and World War II struck hard at the mountain community, but as farming diminished, new residents and recreation enthusiasts took up the slack," Higgins writes. "The Civilian Conservation Corps constructed park infrastructure that drew increasing numbers of visitors, and various commercial enterprises blossomed.
"In 1953, widely acclaimed and prolific author Bernie Babcock retired from the Museum of Natural History and Antiquities (now Little Rock's Museum of Discovery) and moved to a small cabin on Petit Jean's east end. She spent the rest of her life and wrote the last of her many books while living on Petit Jean."
Rockefeller moved to the mountain that same year and began developing the model ranch known as Winrock Farms on worn-out land that once had been used to grow cotton. He later built the Museum of Automobiles to house his antique car collection. The museum still operates.
The Winthrop Rockefeller Institute is where the headquarters of the ranch once stood. WRI includes a museum that outlines not only Rockefeller's life but the history of the mountain. It's easy to see how he found peace here.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.