in grew up in an area called BLUFF PARK , Alabama around 20 miles from Birmingham. I lived 1/4 mile from a place called 'LOVER'S LEAP'. i know that lovers leap is found in many areas across the country but this is the one I was raised with. The following story about this legend was taken from the Bluff Park web page.
http://www.bluffparkal.org/history.htm
Lover's Leap has several historical associations and an Indian legend from which the site takes its name. An Indian brave, supposedly grown weary of the attentions of an Indian princess, took her to the high crest where he stabbed her with a bone knife. Suddenly stricken with remorse, he gathered her in his arms and leaped off the bluff.
The other well-known story of Lover's Leap took place in 1827. Colonel Thomas W. Farrar, an Alabama legislator and lawyer, and his new bride, Seraphine, traveled from Cahaba to Elyton by wagon and stopped to camp for several days atop Shades Mountain. Farrar carved the first four lines of Lord Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" into a rock at Lover's Leap:
To sit on the rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, to slowly trace the
forest's shady scene where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
and mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been.
In the early 1930s the inscribed rock was removed and presented to the Masonic Lodge in Elyton, the oldest lodge in Jefferson County and named for Thomas Farrar. After a failed attempt to have the historic inscription returned, Thomas W. Martin, a long-time resident of the mountain, and George B. Ward arranged to have a replica carved on a rock at Lover's Leap.
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