Travel: Washington and Jefferson’s Favorite Natural Wonder
As recently as the 1950s Virginia’s Natural Bridge was considered a great American landmark. It was advertised on barn sides as far south as Georgia and north into Pennsylvania. A limestone arch 40 feet thick and 100 feet long, it stands more than 200 feet high. It was carved out by a tributary of the James River over the course of 200 million years, and it has hardly changed since 1767, when the 24-year-old Thomas Jefferson got down on his hands and knees and crawled out onto a “parapet of fixed rocks” to peer over the edge of what he called “the most sublime of Nature’s works” and down at Cedar Creek 270 feet below. “Looking down from this height for about a minute,” he wrote, “gave me a violent head ache.”
The view up from below delighted him just as much. “It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here,” he wrote, “so beautiful and arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to the heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!”
The teenaged George Washington, working in the area as a surveyor, had carved his initials in the rock of the bridge in 1750. Jefferson put his stamp on the wonder by purchasing it and the acreage around it in 1774. He never got around to building anything there, but he encouraged a steady stream of artists and tourists to visit and marvel.
High-toned drawings and lithographs of it issued steadily from the 1780s on. In the 1820s the artist Edward Hicks portrayed a Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch, with a little child and wild animals in front of the bridge. In the 1830s the French firm of Zuber et Cie produced a poster-size vista linking the Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls, separated only by a palisade of stone surmounted by tourists in a horse-drawn coach. The Hudson River School painter Frederick Church depicted it in 1852 as a model of the American sublime.
I drove through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to see it during the first week in February. There were no leaves on the trees, and the rivers were frozen. Southbound into Rockbridge County, toward the town of Natural Bridge, the billboards along Route 11 offered a series of ever-hopeful attractions: the Enchanted Castle (now defunct), girded by a fence of Pharaonic heads; “Escape From Dinosaur Kingdom at Natural Bridge, VA!” with animated prehistoric beasts; Professor Cline’s Haunted Monster Museum; Foamhenge, closed for the season.
Nearing the actual site of the Natural Bridge, there’s another incarnation of the Peaceable Kingdom: Natural Bridge Zoo, with a welcoming statue of an elephant on hind legs, trunk up and waving. Natural Bridge Caverns (“There’s a Ghost in the Caverns!”) follows, and then a billboard that may be an expostulation: Natural Bridge Rocks!
At the fork of Routes 11 and 130, below the imposing Natural Bridge Hotel and Conference Center, there’s a large, triangular parking lot. It serves visitors to the pillared and porticoed Natural Bridge Wax Museum and Factory Tour, with “over 165 life replicas” that cover moonshining, Indian legends, Virginia-born Presidents, the War Between the States, and the Last Supper. Cars also park there for the red brick Natural Bridge Entrance and Gift Shop.
A painted statue of a cowboy astride a velociraptor with a large bone in its teeth guards the entrance to the Natural Bridge. You have a psychic if not physical distance to traverse through the snack bar and gift emporium, past the ticket counter, down the staircase by the Natural Bridge Post Office and the Toy Museum at Natural Bridge, which sells “Union ammunition from a Tennessee train wreck: $2 a ball.” Outdoors at last, you encounter the frozen, in February, miniature golf course. Then you proceed down a path beside Cascade Creek and Falls.
Suddenly the place is quiet, even “natural.” All the hoopla is gone. Sunlight plays on the moss. An arborvitae tree that expired in the 1980s (1,600 years old, says the information plaque) looms, supported by cables from the uphill side. At the gorge bottom, past the Summerhouse Cafe, restrooms, and shuttle stop, turn right, and there’s the bridge.
It looks nearly the same as when Fredrick Church saw it, with some paltry alterations. The right-hand creek bank has been leveled and paved. A row of chained benches face the bridge, seating for a narrated biblical Drama of Creation, weekend evenings at dusk, in season, since 1927.
At the time of my visit ice closed the nature path to the Monacan Indian Village, Saltpeter Cave, and Lace Falls, so there was no walking under the bridge, and neither George Washington’s initials nor the Buddha in the Bridge were visible. Also inaccessible was what Jefferson described as “a short but very pleasing view of the North mountain on one side, and Blue ridge on the other, at the distance each of them of about five miles.”
Although perennially strapped for cash, Jefferson never sold the acreage. He thought of it, he wrote, “as a public trust, and would on no consideration permit the bridge to be injured, defaced or masked from public view.” After he died, all he possessed was sold off to settle his debts. In 1833 Joel Lackland bought the Bridge from the President’s heirs Martha Randolph and Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and he erected a tavern and inn near the site. Col. Henry Chester Parsons acquired the place in 1881. He built more hotels, and the Richmond-Alleghany Railroad carried a flood of excursioners to his private park and resort. Since 1988, the property has been held by Natural Bridge of Virginia, LLC, a for-profit corporation owned by a Washington, D.C., real estate investor.
No one really owns the land, of course. At best, we’re stewards. Route 130 east from Natural Bridge runs past Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park at Natural Bridge. Then no more billboards. Northbound on 151 past Glasgow and the town of Buena (pronounced “byoona”) Vista, the places have names like Forks of Buffalo, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Peaks of Otter.
Virginia’s Natural Bridge is open every day from 8 a.m. to dusk. For ticketing, directions, and other information, visit www.naturalbridgeva.com.