Petit Jean State Park- Part Two

It seemed that everywhere we made a stop in this park we would find an old building.

 This one-room cabin was built in 1845. The second family in it had nine children, but only birthed the first 5 children in it.  We found a brochure regarding the Civil Conservation Corp in the visitor's center which explained the many buildings in the park, of which there are over 80.  The CCC Company V-1781 built or preserved the older ones in the 1930s. They also built other structures, trails and bridges listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

I really wanted to hike down by the Cedar Falls, but it would have been a 2 mile trek- no way we could have time for that!  We had to be satisfied with the overlook trail to see the 95 foot cascading waterfall.  The park has 2,658 acres of natural beauty; there are mountain vistas, springs, unmarred woods and ravines. There are also large rock formations and a rock cave containing pictographs left by Native Americans from the Woodland and Mississippi archeological periods. We found a listing of about 8 different trails which could take us to all those sights.  Not today for us,however. We would just have to plan on coming back!

Dr.Thomas William.Hardison and his family lived here for 50 years. He was the one who discovered the Indian pictographs. He loved the natural beauty of this park and pushed for it to become a national park in the 1940s, but was informed that it was too small.  He was instead encouraged to make it a state park.

 

We ate a very late lunch in the dining room of the lodge. Our table overlooked the Cedar Falls and the canyon surrounding it.  The meal was delicious and the view awesome.  Above is the last picture we took leaving the park. It is called the Palisades- a row of cliffs arising from a deep canyon. We were looking again over the Arkansas River Valley. Off in the distance is the Magazine Mountain range, the highest point in Arkansas. It lies within an extension of the Ozark Mountains.