Long before Pinnacle Mountain State Park became a park, two of Arkansas’s most famous writers lived in a house near its base. The house, which sits next to Chief White Horse stable, was called Remembrance Farm. The writers who lived there were John Gould Fletcher and his wife, Charlie May Simon.
In the late 1930s, Fletcher won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, while Simon’s books for children became popular around the country. One of her books, called “Robin on the Mountain,” tells what life was like for early settlers in Arkansas. Even as a boy, young Robin helped build the family’s log cabin and put out a forest fire.
“Robin on the Mountain” begins: "The big road leads out of Little Rock, Arkansas. There it is smooth and wide, and paved with concrete, with automobiles passing quickly up and down it. Then it makes a turn and becomes a gravel road, and after a few miles, it becomes a dirt road, climbing up and up, getting rougher and narrower with each mile."
Charlie May Simon was not writing about Pinnacle Mountain exactly, but the experience she described remains familiar even today.