Air view of Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1936

About this postcard

An air view of Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia, a few miles west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with the limestone arch at lower left and a hotel complex of red roofs set among wooded hills and landscaped grounds. Cedar Creek runs beneath the span. The printed caption gives the bridge as 90 feet long, 100 feet wide on average, 215 feet high, and 40 feet thick, and notes that George III granted Thomas Jefferson 157 acres including the bridge and creek in 1774. Jefferson later called the bridge "the most sublime of Nature's works." By the 1930s the site was a privately run tourist attraction with its own hotel, drawing motor tourists. The sender, signing as Dad, writes that he ate breakfast in Virginia and that "Lenn" is just across the white line in the center of the street, a detail that fits Bristol's Virginia-Tennessee boundary.