Natural Bridge is a 215 foot high limestone and dolomite arch spanning ninety feet over Cedar Creek in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in strata laid down during the Ordovician period roughly 470 million years ago. The bridge is what remains of the roof of an underground channel through which Cedar Creek once flowed; as the stream dissolved the surrounding limestone the tunnel widened into a cave whose roof eventually collapsed everywhere except this one surviving span. Its buttresses are carbonate rock of the Chepultepec Formation, while the arch itself and the rock above it belong to the Beekmantown Formation, both remaining close to horizontal in a landscape where the surrounding strata are folded. The site was sacred to the Monacan people, was visited by frontiersmen from 1742 and reputedly by a young George Washington in 1750, and was purchased by Thomas Jefferson in 1774 for twenty shillings.
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