Thomas Jefferson

Preface

The Natural Bridge of Rockbridge County, Virginia, has long ranked along with the falls of Niagara, since the beginning of books with pictures of the natural wonders of the Western world, as one of the greatest wonders. Thomas Jefferson, we shall see, calls it “the most sublime of Nature’s works.” His “eulogy” of the bridge in Query V of his Notes on the State of Virginia will be the greatest advertisement of the natural wonder during his lifetime and lure many from Virginia, from America, and from Europe to visit it. Yet there are natural stone bridges elsewhere in America—e.g., Wyoming’s Ayers Natural Bridge, Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument, California’s bridge at Natural Bridges State Beach, and Nevada’s Lexington Arch—but the Natural Bridge of Virginia has been the first to gain notoriety, thanks much to the efforts of its one-time owner, Thomas Jefferson. In consequence, there can be no legitimate discussion of that wonderful object, a mirabile visu, without serious discussion of Jefferson’s role as its owner from 1774 till his death in 1826. That story, which is itself wondrous, has never been fully told in a book. This book remedies that defect in Jeffersonian and Rockbridge County scholarship.

Thomas Jefferson, we shall shortly see, is the first North American owner of the Natural Bridge and of the 157–acre tract of land on which it sits. After his death, there will be 12 other owners until it comes under corporate ownership in 1884. In 1925, it comes under the directorship of the Natural Bridge of Virginia, Incorporated. In 2013, it is purchased by the Virginia Conservation Legacy Fund, which today runs the caverns and the Natural Bridge Hotel, though Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation oversees the area’s land as Virginia State Park.

The corporate owners of the Natural Bridge over the years have been fond of telling this Native American legend about bridge.¹ Thousands of years prior to the arrival of the first Europeans in Virginia, there is a violent war among the Native Americans. The Powhatans are allied with the blood-lusting Shawnees, and the two tribes, as one, cause havoc throughout Virginia. At some point, they turn against the unwary Monacans, who are already decimated by famine. The battered Monacans fight bravely, but they are weakened even more by the skirmishes and battles with the Shawnees and Powhatans, and so they retreat, so goes the story, to an unfamiliar forest. Their adversaries, ever determined, pursue them. The Monacans chance to come upon a deep canyon, impossible to pass. Some of the Monacan warriors anxiously peer down from their side of its wall and are dizzied with fear by the long distance to the bottom where a “swiftly running river looked like a small silver ribbon.”²

The Monacans face a large difficulty. How are they to cross the canyon? To leap across the canyon to the other side is a task unfathomable, as the distance from one side to the other is more than 100 feet. There is large desperation and no discernable plan, so the Monacans, anxious but determined, cry out for succor to the Great Spirit. In time, one of the Monacans notices a bridge over the chasm and shouts, “Our prayers have been granted us—the Great Spirit has built for us a bridge across the great abyss.” The women and children are prompted first to pass over the chasm, and they do, while the Monacan men stand valiantly on the bridge, where they turn toward their enemy. Encouraged by the help of the Great Spirit, they bravely turn away their adversaries. After the victorious battle, the Monacans call the Natural Bridge the “Bridge of the Great Spirit” and consider it thereafter to be a hallowed natural object on hallowed ground.³

It is, of course, impossible to know if the legend, even in gist, is true, or if it has been manufactured to give the Natural Bridge, a sublime mirabile visu, sublimity beyond what it possesses to anyone who stands before it. We do know that Monacan natives used the area around the bridge. Thomas Jefferson, in his sole book, Notes on the State of Virginia, tells us that Monacans and Powhatans were at “joint and perpetual war” and that in 1669 there were some 30 Monacan warriors above “the falls” at the fork of James River.⁴ The falls to which he refers is Balcony Falls, and the fork to which he refers is where the James River meets the Maury River.

Another story is probably, at least in gist, true, but it clearly has been given certain garnishments. Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, accompanied by a youthful George Washington, is asked by the British crown to survey the land between Winchester to Buchanan with the aim of linking the two via a road. The road will follow the Old Indian Trail (“Big Path”) and cross over the Natural Bridge. It today forms U.S. 11.⁵ As an embellishment to the story, Washington is said to have hurled a stone from the bottom of the bridge, at Cedar Creek, over the bridge—an event unlikely to have occurred, though not humanly impossible for a strong-armed young man. He is also said to have climbed high the south wall, some 23 feet, and carved “G.W.” into the rock, which can be seen today. There too is found, years later, a large rock, unearthed beneath the bridge, with the letters “G.W.” and along with those letters, there was a surveyor’s cross. Some historians take the lately discovered stone to be confirmation of the “G.W.” on the wall being Washington’s initials.⁶ It is a hypothesis not possible to confirm, yet that hypothesis, treated as fact, makes the story of the Natural Bridge even more incredible than it would be without it.