Throughout his years here, Carl Sandburg often spent afternoons on this granite outcropping, sitting in a rustic bentwood chair with a plain tablet of paper on his lap and a lead pencil sharpened with a favorite pocket-knife. In the serenity of the forest, he reflected on loneliness, memory, people, and places, weighing the sound and power of each word as he crafted his poems amid the cool, dappled shadows.