Property in Pottersville dates back more than 200 years in the same family
By Holly Riddle
Today a popular tourist attraction in Warren County, visiting the Natural Stone Bridge & Caves is no modern activity. Janet “Jenny” Beckler, who’s now in her 80s, says her great-uncle Jim VanBenthuysen would put out a tin cup and “charge a nickel or something” for people to “go down and see what they could see.”
Located in Pottersville, the land on which Natural Stone Bridge & Caves sits has been in the same family since the Revolutionary War, for what Beckler refers to as “several generations before it became the family-run business it is today.
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Her mother, a Latvian immigrant named Elfrieda (Weinberg) Heldt, began building out the business in the 1940s.
“I was the guide, starting at about 7 years old,” Beckler said. “In my bare feet, I would go down and take people through the tour, such as it was then. My brothers built a gift shop and my mom developed the landscaping. My sister was the promoter. She got us on the map.”
Eventually, Beckler went off to college and met her husband, Ed Beckler, and they were married on the grounds before moving around the country for work. For the next 14 years, Jenny’s mother and siblings continued to operate Natural Stone Bridge & Caves, until, in 1970, Jenny and Ed returned.
“It was in the process of being sold. My sister [Lydia] was running it alone at that time and it was just way too much for her,” described Jenny. “She put it on the market and we thought, ‘That can’t happen. We don’t want to see it leave the family.’”
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At the time, Jenny and Ed were living in Pennsylvania and Ed was working as a civil engineer in the oil industry.
“I knew it was a lot of work to come back here, but what an opportunity,” she said. “It’s a great place to raise kids and being back home, being able to improve the business and keep it going and grow it, was a wonderful opportunity for us.”
Jenny and Ed took over for the next 30 years. Over that time, they started the business’s extensive rock shop and established an ice cream shop. Keeping with tradition, the operation was a family affair.
“Our kids started work as soon as they were able to walk. They would be out picking up cigarette butts at a penny apiece,” said Ed.
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The pair’s eldest son, Greg, was 11 when his parents purchased the property from his aunt.
“Pretty quickly, I got ambitious and convinced [my parents] that if they would buy me a Polaroid camera, I would repay them. I walked the trails and took pictures of people for a dollar apiece,” he said.
Like his parents before him, Greg and his wife, Dee Beckler, enjoyed careers elsewhere before returning to the fold. Greg worked in biotech for 20 years and Dee worked as a therapist, eventually establishing the Abanakee Wellness Center in Warrensburg. However, Greg said that he always knew he would come back to the family business and that’s exactly what he did, in 2000.
Now, multiple family members, including Greg and Dee’s daughter, Jen, work at the attraction full-time, with other family members filtering in and out for seasonal work, particularly younger family members throughout their teen and college years.
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All in all, it’s been nine generations of the same family overseeing the natural landmark — and the Becklers hope the tradition continues.
“Hopefully it’s still a family business,” said Jen of what the future might look like for Natural Stone Bridge & Caves, “and a place where our employees feel like family. That’s really important — the connections we make within the community. We depend on the people that work here. We depend on our staff to give our customers a good experience. It’s really essentially that [the business] stays people-first.”
A recent video marking the 85th year of Natural Stone Bridges & Caves as an “official” business
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