Mt. Nebo Arkansas Lover’s Leap

Real photo postcard, “Looking north from Lovers Leap, Mt. Nebo, Ark. GNissom Photo.” Circa 1910.

This card is a little battered card with a corner missing, but it captures a pretty cool image. In the distant background is the Summit Park Hotel opened in 1889 by Captain Joseph Evans and the Mount Nebo Improvement Company. This luxury hotel catered to the upper class, and during the summer season as many as five thousand people lived or vacationed there. The hotel burned down in 1919.

One trail through Queen Wilhelmina State Park in Mena, Arkansas now bears the name Lover’s Leap Trail. We found little about the legend from which it got its name, so we contacted the park. Jackie Rupp, the park interpreter, provided this tale, with the following caveat: “I have no idea how old that story is or how accurate. I have no clue about the source of this story. It could have come from someone who used to work here who made it up and passed it along to other people who worked here. It could have come from a resident who lives on Mount Nebo. It could have been written down, and I just haven’t found it. I haven’t found any newspaper articles about a woman who committed suicide up here. I haven’t found anywhere where this particular story is written down. It may or may not be a good idea to include that story in your book.”

The Lover’s Leap tale she often recounts on walking tours of the park tells the story of a woman who worked at the hotel and fell in love with a wealthy man staying there. “One night, he told her to meet him at Fern Lake, a pond below Lover’s Leap. The woman stole off to Fern Lake to meet him but when she got there, she saw him with another woman. She was so distraught she climbed to Lover’s Leap and jumped off, killing herself. “

Mt. Nebo in Polk County, Arkansas, is technically in the Ouachita Mountains, not the Ozarks, but they share some geomorphic and cultural history. One of the highest peaks in Arkansas and now a state park, Mt. Nebo is a popular recreational area.

See sample pages from the forthcoming book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, on our website: beautifulozarks.com.

Lens & Pen books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. Their most recent book, James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River is a finalist in Regional Non-fiction in the 2019 Indie Book Awards. Lens & Pen Press’s earlier river book, Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, was awarded a silver medal by the Independent Publishers’ Book Awards in 2013.