One of Virginia’s most amazing architectural treasures wasn’t formed by the hand of man at all, and it’s listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Thomas Jefferson once owned it. George Washington is said to have surveyed its location as a young lad of 17—though he was fully commissioned as a surveyor with a certification from the College of William & Mary. The future president, according to local lore, even carved his initials in the stone of it, though that story is simply not provable. Frederic Church made a painting of it as well.
Virginia’s Natural Bridge has stood, amazing those who have beheld it, since long before European settlers ever came to the Great Valley of Virginia. Spanning the limestone gorge of Cedar Creek in Rockbridge County, Virginia, the 215-foot-tall Natural Bridge today carries a U.S. highway, Route 11, across the chasm. It’s perhaps the only formation of its type to be listed as a highway bridge by the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Formed by the elements, Natural Bridge is all that remains of the roof of an ancient cavern, the bulk of which collapsed into Cedar Creek long ago. The first European to write about the bridge was John Peter Salling, who in 1742 was among five Virginia explorers departing from the region on a journey to the Mississippi River. Thomas Jefferson purchased the 157-acre tract of land that contains the bridge in 1774. The surveyor of record is James Tremble, though Washington may have worked for him. Interestingly enough, Tremble’s survey makes no mention of the Natural Bridge.
“Natural Bridge” by Flavius Fisher, part of the Lora Robins Collection of Virginia. (Public Domain)
Jefferson himself spares no words in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1787) description:
The Natural Bridge, the most sublime of nature’s works, though not comprehended under the present head, must not be pretermitted. It is on the ascent of a hill, which seems to have been cloven through its length by some great convulsion. The fissure, just at the bridge, is by some admeasurements, 270 feet deep, by others only 205. It is about 45 feet wide at the bottom, and 90 feet at the top; this of course determines the length of the bridge, and its height from the water, its breadth in the middle is about 60 feet, but more at the ends, and the thickness of the mass at the summit of the arch, about 40 feet. A part of this thickness is constituted by a coat of earth, which gives growth to many large trees. The residue, with the hill on both sides, is one solid rock of lime-stone. The arch approaches the semi-elliptical form; but the larger axis of the ellipses, which would be the cord of the arch, is many times longer than the transverse. Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them, and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet, and peep over it.
Bob Kirchman is an architectural illustrator who lives in Augusta County, Va., with his wife Pam. He teaches studio art, with a good deal of art history thrown in, to students in the Augusta Christian Educators Homeschool Coop. Kirchman is an avid hiker and loves exploring the hidden wonders of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Virginia State Capitol rendered in an 1830 watercolor by William Goodacre. (Public Domain)
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson found himself in France as our first ambassador. While he was there he fell in love. Arrested by its striking classical beauty, the patriot became smitten with a small Roman temple in Nîmes known as the Maison Carrée (square house). Describing it as “the most perfect model existing of what might be called cubic architecture,” Jefferson sketched a design for the Capitol of Virginia, to be built in Richmond. “Very simple, noble beyond expression,” he continued in praise of the original, as he and French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau collaborated on their new design. Completed in 1788, it was, according to architectural historian George Heard Hamilton, “the first building to be so called in modern times, and the first since antiquity specifically intended for republican legislative functions … the State Capitol in Richmond, Virginia.”
The Maison Carrée in Nîmes, France, became Thomas Jefferson’s inspiration for the Virginia Capitol in Richmond. (Krzysztof Golick, cc license)
But Jefferson had not actually visited the temple in Nîmes when he designed Virginia’s Capitol—he had only seen it in a lithograph. Two years after he drew the plans, he visited Nîmes and found himself “gazing whole hours at the Maison quarée, like a lover at his mistress,” he wrote at the time. It is a fitting beginning for America’s love affair with classical architecture. Jefferson is known primarily as a founding father and statesman, but in his day, men of letters were often schooled in the principles of building design. As a prominent landowner, he would have directed the construction of his house and farm buildings, while as a civic leader, he would have done so for important public buildings as well. The Virginia State Capitol’s story really began in 1785, when the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Director of Public Buildings sent a letter to Paris, asking Jefferson for an edifice design. It was to be built on Shockoe Hill, overlooking the falls of the James River, in Richmond. Jefferson considered the site to be a perfect location for a “temple to Liberty or Justice,” and studied a number of Greek and Roman temples as potential models.
The 18th-century excavation of Pompeii had led to the publishing of some wonderfully illustrated books that became widely available in print for just such a time as his. The rich engravings of “L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures” (“Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams”), by Bernard de Montfaucon, and Andrea Palladio’s “I quattro libri dell’architettura” (“The Four Books of Architecture”) would inspire America’s first classicists. When Jefferson designed the Virginia Capitol building in collaboration with Clérisseau, he based his design on just such an engraving. The bibliophile Jefferson found in France a wealth of material to inspire him, but how could he adequately convey his designs to builders an ocean away?
The builders in Virginia were skilled in working with native materials such as clay-fired brick and carved wood, often working with minimal plans as they replicated the Georgian architecture brought from England. Virginia’s Capitol would require much more guidance. Architectural model-making was already a high art in France, so Jefferson commissioned Jean-Pierre Fouquet, a master modeler, to construct a 1-60 (where 1 inch equals 5 feet) detailed model in plaster of Paris. Fouquet didn’t work cheaply, so Jefferson apparently ordered only the front and sides, leaving the back to be added later. He was compelled to explain that it was “absolutely necessary for the guide of workmen not very expert in their art.”
The Virginia Capital as it appears today—a “temple to Liberty or Justice.” (Public Domain)
Fouquet had an impressive résumé. Jefferson wrote of him: “an artist who had been employed by the … ambassador of France to Constantinople, in making models of the most celebrated remains of ancient architecture in that country.” Indeed, his work would inform the high design of L’École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts). It also informed the work of Virginia’s most celebrated architectural amateur. Fouquet’s model for the Virginia Capitol was quite detailed, right down to the positioning of tie rods. It was shipped to Virginia as a guide for the artisans—a proportional representation of Maison Carrée to be sure. But today it shows one major change that Jefferson made: the fluted Corinthian columns of the original have been replaced with simpler Ionic columns. Perhaps this was a kindness to the artisans who had to build it. Perhaps it was a matter of taste. At some point in the 1870s, Jefferson sketched a design concept for a future Virginia Capitol that featured the Ionic order.
Jefferson himself would not return to Virginia from France until 1789, meaning his most prominent civic design was built entirely without his direct supervision. The builders, possibly led by Samuel Dobie, eliminated the front stairs, opting instead for a couple of smaller side entrances. This was done to provide better lighting for the basement offices. The result was a grand portico awkwardly perched on a raised foundation. Jefferson’s interior design was radically changed as well. A gallery was constructed in the meeting space, supported by brackets. There would be no columns—Jefferson had wanted columns. This design change would prove disastrous when it collapsed in 1870, injuring 251 people and killing 62.
Initially, the Virginia Capitol and Jefferson’s other works were not painted white. Tan- and sand-colored paint added contrast between pilasters and panels, mimicking the colors found in antiquity. Stucco and white paint were added around the turn of the century. In 1904, classical architect John Kevan Peebles designed two wings to house the assembly chambers, attached by hyphens to each side of the original building. The front stairs envisioned by Jefferson were added as well. Peebles would later distinguish himself by designing pavilions for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exhibition, Virginia’s first world’s fair. One thing that has remained constant in the Virginia Capitol building is the display of the 1788 life sculpture of George Washington, by Jean-Antoine Houdon, which has remained in the central rotunda since its arrival in 1796.
If 19th-century engravings are any indication, the building seems to have indeed become symbolic of Jefferson’s civic ideals. It rises above the bustle of the city like the Parthenon above Athens in a number of artistic representations. Jefferson would continue to influence American civic architecture. Both his Monticello estate and his subsequent design for the University of Virginia’s Academical Village are directly inspired by Andrea Palladio’s illustrations of Roman villas. The Pantheon inspired his central building at the University. As these classical forms took shape in brick and wood, Jefferson became a hands-on manager. He would make numerous changes to Monticello, tearing down and rebuilding whole portions of it. He personally designed three Virginia county courthouses, as well as a number of private homes. His enduring work has inspired legions of Virginia builders since.
Bob Kirchman is an architectural illustrator who lives in Augusta County, Virginia, with his wife Pam. He teaches studio art (with a good deal of art history thrown in) to students in the Augusta Christian Educators Homeschool Coop. Kirchman is an avid hiker and loves exploring the hidden wonders of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"A Map of the State of Virginia," 1827, by Herman Böÿe, engraved by Benjamin Tanner, features this illustration of the University of Virginia's Academical Village, as seen in 1826. (Herman Böÿe’s 1859 Map of Virginia. Library of Congress)
If you had traveled with the Marquis de Lafayette to the Piedmont region of Virginia in 1824, you would have been amazed to come upon a beautifully proportioned village being built in the finest tradition of Renaissance planning. Ten pavilions connected by colonnades extending from a great building resembling the Roman Pantheon rose impressively above the rolling fields of Albemarle County. Lafayette had come as the guest of Thomas Jefferson to the University of Virginia’s nascent Academical Village, Jefferson’s last major architectural project. Lafayette and Jefferson dined together with James Madison and almost 400 dignitaries on the top floor of the still-unfinished Rotunda (the recreated Pantheon) and savored the view of the surrounding countryside.
R.D. Ward wrote of the occasion: “The meats were excellent, and each eye around us beamed contentment. It was contentment arising from the performance of the most sacred, the most grateful duty. It was the offering of liberty to him who had gratuitously aided to achieve it. In the language of Mr. Madison, it was ‘Liberty, where virtue was the guest, and gratitude the feast.’”
Andrea Palladio inspired the ‘Academical Village,’ a Renaissance village in frontier America. (Bob Kirchman)
The university that Jefferson so proudly presented to his compatriot in the cause of liberty was a project that the third president had long cherished in his heart. The seeds were first planted when Jefferson himself was a student at the College of William & Mary, located in Williamsburg, the capital of Colonial Virginia. Jefferson began acquiring what would become his extensive collection of books—and the first library of the University of Virginia. He purchased a treatise on classical architecture, in a shop close to the college, and so began his study of the art of building. He would eventually acquire “A Book of Architecture” and “The Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture,” by James Gibbs; “Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne” (“A parallel of the ancient architecture with the modern”), by Roland Fréart de Chambray and Charles Errard; as well as “The Four Books of Architecture,” by Andrea Palladio. He was certainly also acquainted with Bernard de Montfaucon’s “L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures” (“Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams”), which features a detailed illustration of the Roman Pantheon. These were the guiding texts for America’s most prolific amateur architect as he set to work designing an institution of higher learning.
The Pantheon was the model for Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda. Bernard de Montfaucon’s “L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures” (“Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams”) provides a detailed drawing. (L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée by Bernard de Montfaucon, public domain)The Rotunda is actually smaller than the Roman Pantheon. (Bob Kirchman)
When young Jefferson attended William & Mary, it was essentially housed in one large building, the Wren Building, which still dominates one end of Duke of Gloucester Street today. Jefferson had proposed an addition to the College of William & Mary in the late 1700s, along with a few proposals for reform of that institution—they weren’t well-received by the administration, leading Jefferson to pursue his vision in Charlottesville, Virginia, as his career drew to a close. The villa designs of Palladio, the great Renaissance architect, had inspired Jefferson’s own home, Monticello, and furthermore, on a plot of land visible from the “Little Mountain,” would also inspire a new kind of college campus—a fitting “academical village” for a new republic. Renaissance architecture had sought to open up the congestion of medieval towns with plazas and squares, and Leonardo da Vinci had even conceptualized a redesign of Milan along those lines in the wake of deadly bubonic plague outbreaks that ravaged the city in 1484 and 1485.
But it was a French hospital that likely gave Jefferson his most powerful inspiration. The Hôtel-Dieu had a unique problem that Jefferson became aware of when he was in Paris. This hospital in the heart of the city had been the center of France’s health care system since the Middle Ages. It was housed in a single building that was overcrowded and conducive to the spread of disease. Louis XVI had been concerned by reports of its mortality rate. In 1787, plans for four separate hospitals that could replace Hôtel-Dieu were drafted by Jean-Baptiste Le Roy with assistance from scientists Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours and the Marquis de Condorcet, both of whom were friends of Jefferson. Le Roy’s plans called for a series of pavilions connected by colonnades, with a Palladian site plan for each campus. Though they were never actually built, these campus designs might have inspired Jefferson to write in support of the hospital model for Virginia’s new university: “An academic village instead of a large and common den of noise, filth, and fetid air. It would afford the quiet retirement so friendly to study and lessen the dangers of fire, infection, and tumult. This village form is preferable to a single great building for many reasons, particularly on account of fire, health, economy, peace, and quiet.”
Pavilion VII, view at the colonnade. (Bob Kirchman)
By 1817, Jefferson had laid out his campus in an open “U” similar to Le Roy’s designs, collaborating with Dr. William Thornton and Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The Rotunda would command one end of his lawn, flanked by 10 pavilions connected by two colonnades. The other end would open to the rolling hills of Albemarle County. He said of it: “Now what we wish is that these pavilions they will shew themselves above the dormitories, be models of taste and good architecture, & of a variety of appearance, no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the architectural lectures.” Indeed, each featured a distinctive employment of one of the classical orders in columns and entablature. The lower level of each pavilion would house classrooms, and the upper story would be an apartment for a professor. “Each unit, identified with one of the 10 ‘sciences useful in our time’ was to be inhabited by a professor who taught that subject.” Students were to be housed in rooms that opened into the colonnade. An outer series of buildings known as the Range provided additional housing and kitchens.
A view down the colonnade connecting the pavilions. (Bob Kirchman)
The University of Virginia was still being constructed when Lafayette visited in 1824. Classes began the next year, with five professors (all recruited from Europe) and a few dozen students. The faculty eventually expanded with the hiring of American teachers. As the student population grew, the need for more space prompted the building of a four-story annex to the Rotunda in 1851. This huge addition created precisely the kind of structure Jefferson had sought to avoid, but he had passed in 1826 and was no longer there to guide improvements. In 1895, the Rotunda Annex burned to the ground. In an attempt to save the original Rotunda, the portico connecting it to the burning annex was dynamited. The fire was still able to leap to the Rotunda and it was gutted. Though students and faculty rushed in to salvage books and artworks, much of Jefferson’s library was lost. Today the Rotunda stands after many restorations, still very much a “temple of knowledge and enlightenment.”
The curved brick walls of the Rotunda. (Bob Kirchman)
Benjamin Henry Latrobe II’s Thomas Viaduct from ‘The United States Illustrated,’ 1858, by Charles Dana. (Public Domain, Republished by Library of Congress)
Charles Carroll of Carrollton might well have been the Elon Musk of his day. The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence was certainly an influencer. Carroll sponsored advances in agriculture, and, encouraged by his partnership with John, George, and Andrew Ellicott, Carroll promoted the use of crop rotation and pulverized limestone on his large Maryland estate. In 1828, he also laid the cornerstone for one of America’s first railroads, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O).
At the time, as connection to the West was a major concern for many in the young nation, Carroll had already helped found the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company (C&O Canal). That canal began in Washington, D.C., and followed the Potomac River west. Likewise, George Washington helped build the James River and Kanawha Canal, which was designed to connect the Ohio Valley with the coast by way of Richmond, Virginia.
Canal boats on the James River and Kanawha Canal even had cabins for passengers making the journey. Sketch by J.R. Hamilton, published in Harper’s Weekly. (Library of Congress)
Without such connections, trade would logically flow to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, bypassing the former British colonies altogether—but there were the mountains to reckon with. The Great Falls of the Potomac stood in the way for the C&O Canal as well. The James River and Kanawha Canal made its way through the Blue Ridge Mountains following the path cut by the James—but then there were the Alleghenies.
A terrazzo map of the James River and Kanawha Canal on the floor of the James Center, in Richmond, Va. (Bob Kirchman)
An incredibly complex system of locks, canals, and even tunnels would be necessary to connect the two watersheds. Each lock was an amazing bit of masonry and wood construction, allowing boats to rise and descend between levels of the canal. Remains can still be seen along the Maury River in Rockbridge County, Virginia, today.
The coming of the railroad opened up new avenues of westward commerce. No longer dependent on a regularly flowing system of waterways, and requiring less excavation, railroads could facilitate travel across the entire country. They needed no complex locks to cross the mountains, only a steady grade, and that required bridges and tunnels.
The B&O wound its way out of Baltimore along the Patapsco River on a gentle grade, while ample locally quarried granite allowed for the construction of some fine viaducts and other necessary structures.
The Oliver Viaduct, across Tiber Creek, in Ellicott City, Md. This was the first terminus of the B&O. (Bob Kirchman)
A Roman arch was employed in America’s very first railroad bridge, the Carrollton Viaduct, named after Carroll’s estate. Initially the tracks had no ties; instead, straps of iron were laid on top of continuous granite pieces that ran along the length of the road, allowing a smooth path for the horses that pulled the first railway carriages.
The completion of the first 13 miles of track, to Ellicott’s Mills, created a popular excursion for the residents of Baltimore.
In the early days of the B&O, the motive power was provided by horses, but horsepower would soon become a standard instead of a literal fact. Although it lost its famous race with a horse-drawn carriage, Peter Cooper’s small locomotive “Tom Thumb,” with its upright boiler, would—together with steam engines in general—define the future of railroading.
In the interim, however, even wind power was considered. Evan Thomas of Baltimore constructed an experimental wicker railroad car with a sail, which he named the Aeolus. When there was enough wind blowing in the right direction to make it functional, it was operated on the tracks between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills.
The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Paul von Krüdener, came to observe the operation of the experimental car, and actually handled the sail on the trip. In return, the president of the B&O presented the ambassador with a model of the car. The occasion led to an exchange of American engineers who helped construct Russia’s rail system.
In England, nobility resisted the building of railroads. The Duke of Wellington said of civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway, from London to Bristol, “It will encourage the working classes to move about!”
America’s leaders, on the other hand, chartered railways with enthusiasm, knowing that westward movement would be essential to the building of the republic. The B&O pressed on to Wheeling, West Virginia (then Virginia), and the Ohio River. A line was built between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., for which Benjamin Henry Latrobe II, son of America’s first formally trained architect, designed the elegant Thomas Viaduct to carry trains across the Patapsco. A curved viaduct of Roman arches, it remains in use today.
The Thomas Viaduct still carries freight and commuter trains to this day. (Bob Kirchman)
Around 1853, Charles A. Dana published a beautiful lithograph of it in his book, “The United States Illustrated,” writing of it:
The “Pons Narniensis,” whose framer was the imperial Augustus; the arches of Trajan over the Danube, and the bridge of Alcantara across the Spanish Tagus, have long been famous in ancient history, whilst America, for the accommodation of no imperial cortege, but of the masses of the people, has rivalled them all in her numerous railroad viaducts, and especially in the Starucca Viaduct upon the Erie Railroad.
The one given in the engraving was of the first built in the country, although exceeded by the one above named in length, breadth, height, and the span of the arches, it is not surpassed for beauty of location and compactness of execution.
Claudius Crozet was born on Dec. 31, 1789, in Villefranche, France. He studied at the École Polytechnique and became an engineer in the French Army, serving under Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1816 he resigned his commission and came to the United States, where in 1858 he completed what was at its time one of the longest railway tunnels in the world. Measuring 4,237 feet, it was one of a series of tunnels that Crozet designed to carry the Virginia Central Railroad through the Blue Ridge Mountains and on into the Alleghenies. The Western Portal of the Blue Ridge Tunnel is a magnificent stone arch; it’s a parabolic arch rather than a strictly Roman one, to allow for locomotive stacks and ventilation.
As late as 1874, the B&O was still building stone viaducts as it advanced a railway line through Virginia to Lexington, Kentucky. One particularly fine example may be seen by travelers on Interstate 81 as they drive through Augusta County in Virginia.
Bob Kirchman is an architectural illustrator who lives in Augusta County, Virginia, with his wife, Pam. He teaches studio art (with a good deal of art history thrown in) to students in the Augusta Christian Educators Homeschool Coop. Kirchman is an avid hiker and loves exploring the hidden wonders of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
