Visiting Natural Bridge State Park offers an awe-inspiring journey through natural beauty and American history. The main draw is the colossal 215-foot-tall limestone arch, carved by Cedar Creek over millions of years and once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Visitors can access the natural wonder via the Cedar Creek Trail, a scenic path that descends from the visitor center, winding alongside the gorge and offering stunning views of the bridge from below. The experience allows you to appreciate the sheer scale of the arch, which stands taller than Niagara Falls, and walk the same ground as famous figures from the nation's past.
Beyond the main attraction, the park features a network of hiking trails that lead to other sights within the picturesque landscape of forests and rolling meadows. The Cedar Creek Trail continues beyond the bridge to the 30-foot Lace Falls and passes by a small cave and a "lost river," which vanishes into the karst terrain. With over 10 miles of trails in total, there are opportunities for varying levels of hikers to explore. The park is also an International Dark Sky Park, offering unique ranger-led evening programs for stargazing, adding another dimension to this historic and naturally stunning destination.
Thomas Jefferson purchased the Natural Bridge and 157 acres in the 1780s. Lexington resident William Caruthers managed Jefferson’s business affairs in Rockbridge, and in 1817 wrote Jefferson that “Patrick Henry a free man of Colour requested me to write you that he will rent what land is cultivatable on the Bridge Tract – which is perhaps 10 acres all of which [he] is to clear off and enclose and for which he is willing to pay a fair value. Patrick is a man of good behaviour and as the neighbors are destroying your timber verry much it might not be amiss to authorize him to take care of it in order to which it might be well to have the lines run by the surveyor of the county.”
Jefferson responded to Caruthers that “I readily consent that Patrick Henry, the freeman of colour, whom you recommend, should live on my land at the Natural Bridge, and cultivate the cultivatable lands on it, on the sole conditions of paying the taxes annually as they arise, and of preventing trespasses.”
Patrick Henry became the first guide for the Natural Bridge, as reflected in an 1838 article recounting a visit there in 1818 by several Washington College students. It referred to a “sort of journal, kept to record visiter’s (sic) names by poor Patrick Henry, a man of color, who kept the bridge.”
