Natural Bridge: Sixteen Million Years, One Tourist Trap, and Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson owned Natural Bridge. He purchased it from the British Crown in seventeen seventy-four for twenty shillings, which was approximately five dollars at the time. He called it the most sublime of Nature's works, which was the kind of thing Jefferson said, but in this case he had grounds. Natural Bridge is a two-hundred-fifteen-foot limestone arch spanning Cedar Creek in the Allegheny foothills of western Virginia, and it is, by any geological standard, remarkable.

The arch was carved by the creek over millions of years as Cedar Creek cut downward through the limestone plateau while the harder stone of the arch resisted erosion. The result is a naturally occurring bridge with a road across its top, which has carried a continuous road since the colonial period and still carries U.S. Highway Eleven today. George Washington reportedly surveyed the gorge below the arch as a young man, and his initials are said to be carved into the stone wall, though the attribution is unverified.

Jefferson could not live at Natural Bridge full-time, but he built a small cabin there for guests and visited when he could. He described the experience of looking down from the arch as that of flight. He wrote about it in Notes on the State of Virginia, the only book he published, which made Natural Bridge internationally known in educated European circles before most Americans had heard of it.

After Jefferson's death, the property passed through a series of owners who developed it as a commercial attraction. By the twentieth century it had become the kind of roadside destination that erects wax museums and gift shops alongside geological wonders. The nonprofit Virginia Conservation Legacy Fund purchased Natural Bridge in two thousand thirteen, and the state opened it as a state park in two thousand sixteen. The wax museum is gone. The arch remains.