Crystal Hill

Crystal Hill is a prominent land feature in Pulaski County, Arkansas. The hill is near the intersection of Interstate 40 and Interstate 430 about twelve miles northwest of downtown Little Rock. It is thought that some of the early Native American quartz tools found at Toltec Mounds were manufactured from rock found at Crystal Hill.

Crystal Hill was the site of perhaps the first permanent settlement in the county, Pyeattstown was founded here by brothers James Pyeatt and Jacob Pyeatt in 1807.

Territorial Governor James Miller bought land at the settlement and in 1820 made a failed attempt to name it the Arkansas state capitol. Other early settlers at Pyeattstown included William Lockwood, Jonathan Pharr, the Reverend John Carnahan, Edmund Hogan, and the French speculator Louis Brangiere who mistakenly thought he had found silver embedded in the crystals that could be found at the site. When John Trammel found Brangiere's mine in 1815 he took samples to Arkansas Post where Francis Notrebe determined that the crystals contained gold flakes. It was later determined that he was mistaken in this view.

References

• Dallas Tabor Herndon, Centennial History of Arkansas (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1922), 164, 797.
• George H. Odell, Stone Tools: Theoretical Insights into Human Prehistory (Springer, 1996), 192, 196-202.
• Josiah Hazen Shinn, Pioneers and Makers of Arkansas (Genealogical Publishing Co., 1908), 47-48.