Battlefield preservation

A significant piece of the first day’s battlefield at Gettysburg lies just to the west of Willoughby Run. John Buford’s dismounted cavalrymen fought their way back to McPherson’s Ridge from Herr’s Ridge across this ground. The parcel includes the spot where Confederate Brig. Gen. James J. Archer was captured on July 1, 1863. The Iron Brigade slugged it out with Pettigrew’s North Carolinians there in some of the bloodiest, closest fighting of the Battle of Gettysburg.

That land has, for the past sixty years or so, been the property of the Gettysburg Country Club. The Gettysburg Country Club owns 120 acres, including a nine-hole golf course, a clubhouse, a swimming pool, and tennis courts.

The Country Club defaulted on its mortgage, and the lender initiated foreclosure proceedings. The property–a very significant portion of the battlefield–goes to sheriff’s sale tomorrow. If I had $2.9 million to just throw away, I would purchase the property just to preserve it. Sadly, I have nothing remotely close to that kind of money, so that’s not an option. So, the question is, what will happen to it?

According to today’s edition of The Hanover Sun newspaper, even though the land is within the park’s boundaries, the Park Service will not be bidding on the property tomorrow:

Battlefield not a buyer for country club

By ERIN JAMES
Evening Sun Reporter
Posted: 01/08/2009 11:00:47 AM EST

For sale: A historic war zone, where some of the Battle of Gettysburg’s “bloodiest” fighting took place.

The 120-acre property comes complete with a nine-hole golf course, new clubhouse and a legacy rivaled only by the battlefield’s more famous areas.

At least one party is interested in the Gettysburg Country Club, which after falling into financial distress last year will be auctioned off at 10 a.m. Friday at the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.

But Gettysburg National Military Park won’t be placing any bids on the property.

Though it is within the park’s Congressionally designated 6,000-acre boundary, Gettysburg Country Club is privately owned – which means the park has virtually no say over what the current or new owner does with the land.

Park officials had been in discussions with owners of the Gettysburg Country Club, 730 Chambersburg Road, about purchasing a conservation easement on the property that would protect it from future development, park spokeswoman Katie Lawhon said.

But those conversations went nowhere, and the park abandoned its efforts to secure an easement through the property’s current owners.

Assuming that a third party purchases the Gettysburg Country Club Friday, Lawhon said the park would revisit the possibility of an easement.

“We would be interested in talking to new owners about it as well,” she said.

Because of its significance to the battle, the club’s 120 acres are named a “high priority” list of potential land acquisitions compiled by the Park Service in 1993.

“Quite a bit happened out there,” said Scott Hartwig, supervisory historian at Gettysburg National Military Park.

On the morning of July 1, 1863, Union Brig. Gen. John Buford’s cavalry moved across the area that is now the Gettysburg Country Club and dismounted on Herr’s Ridge. Confederate infantry under Gen. Henry Heth drove Buford’s cavalry off Herr’s Ridge and back across the golf course property to McPherson’s Ridge.

Later in the day, in pursuit of Buford’s retreating cavalry, 1,100 Confederate infantrymen under Gen. James Archer were advancing across golf course property when they were attacked by the famed Iron Brigade.

“They were surprised because they didn’t anticipate to run into any Union infantry,” Hartwig said.

It was there that Archer became the first Confederate general captured by Union forces since Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia.

“Archer is probably captured near where some of the buildings associated with some of the country club are today,” Hartwig said.

By the late morning or early afternoon, the Iron Brigade fell back to a defensive position in Herbst Woods on the west bank of Willoughby Run, along McPherson’s Ridge. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country club property, Confederate forces of Gen. Heth’s division were forming a strong battle line in preparation for an afternoon attack.

What happened next bears similarities to the infamous Pickett’s Charge attack that essentially annihilated Confederate forces in Gettysburg.

“In a sense, this is the same thing on a much smaller scale,” Hartwig said.

With some 3,000 men, Confederate Gen. James Pettigrew’s North Carolina brigade advanced across the country club property and attacked the Iron Brigade. The North Carolinians came under heavy fire before they reached Willoughby Run, suffering heavy casualties on present country club property. They fought their way across the creek to ground that is now part of the national park and eventually drove the Iron Brigade back.

“That fighting there is man for man, probably the bloodiest fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg,” Hartwig said.

When the fighting was over, the Iron Brigade had lost 1,200 of 1,800 men. Pettigrew’s brigade lost close to 1,100.

Tomorrow’s auction is open to the public.

Susquehanna Banks, which foreclosed on the property, is asking for a minimum of $2.9 million.

Contact Erin James at ejames@eveningsun.com.

IF YOU GO:

What: Sheriff’s sale of the Gettysburg Country Club, 730 Chambersburg Road

Where: Adams County Sheriff’s Office on the first level of the Adams County Courthouse

When: 10 a.m. Friday

So, the fate of this absolutely critical piece of battlefield land remains completely up in the air. Whether the new purchaser will maintain the fundamental integrity of the ground as the country club has, or whether the new owner will try to develop the land remains an open question. We can only hope that someone responsible ends up as the owner of this property and that the new owner does the right thing and grants the preservation easement mentioned in the article.

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Fellow blogger and my co-author on the baseball project, Michael Aubrecht passed along this bit about an upcoming open house where the Wilderness Wal-Mart will be discussed:

Michael Aubrecht, local Fredericksburg area-resident and board member of the Civil War Life Foundation (www.civilwarlife.org), has offered up the following invitation to everyone concerned with the threat of a new Wal-Mart infringing on the hallowed grounds of The Wilderness Battlefield. It states: The Civil War Life Soldiers Museum in Spotsylvania County will be hosting an open house on the evening on January 7th from 7pm to 8:30pm to provide interested local citizens with information about this controversial project and our community’s opposition to it. There will be representatives on hand from the NCWL, NPS, CWPT, and other preservation and heritage groups. Talks will take place and printed information will be available for all attendees to take and share with their own constituents. There will also be complimentary snacks and beverages available. Join us for an evening of important discussions and solidarity as we collectively tackle this impending calamity that threatens yet another piece of our area’s precious history. This is an officially sanctioned Civil War Preservation Trust event and the only one of its kind in the area. For directions to the museum, please visit http://civilwar-life.com/map.htm.

If you’re in the area, please take the time to go out and let the world know you oppose this project.

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From today’s issue of the Washington Post. Thanks to Todd Berkoff for bringing this article to my attention:

History Buffs Rise Against Wal-Mart
Store Planned Near Civil War Battlefield in Va.
By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 27, 2008; B01

Like Civil War generals, the generals of modern commercial development are attracted to large open spaces along well-traveled roads, typically on the outskirts of a town or major population center. The former picked those sites for battlefields a century and a half ago; the latter like them today for big-box stores.

And once again, great armies are mustering on the Virginia Piedmont — historians and preservationists on one side, big retail and developers on the other — this time in cash-strapped Orange County, 60 miles south of the District, where Wal-Mart wants to build a supercenter directly opposite the Wilderness Battlefield.

There, in May 1864, 24,000 soldiers were killed or wounded as the first clash between Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant produced famously hellish combat in a burning thicket of scrub oak and spindly pine trees. The National Park Service owns 2,800 acres of the core battlefield, whose larger area extends across nearly 7,000 acres.

That land is mostly undeveloped, and to Wal-Mart, it looks like a prime retail location. The parcel where the company plans to build its 138,000-square-foot store and parking lot has long been zoned for commercial development but has little more than a small shopping plaza opposite a Sheetz gas station. There are also preliminary plans for a larger retail, office and residential complex, Wilderness Crossing, that would be built adjacent to the Wal-Mart, although no formal proposals have been submitted.

Neither the supercenter nor the larger complex would be built on the core battlefield area. A study commissioned by the company found that the parcel slated for development is not historically or archaeologically significant.

But opponents contend that the supercenter would unleash a wave of sprawling development through the area, marring the mostly rural landscape and the memory of the dead. The Battle of the Wilderness was the first clash in the long Overland Campaign that would end the war 11 months later at Appomattox Courthouse, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson.

“The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved,” read a letter signed by McPherson and 252 other historians and preservationists that was sent Wednesday to Wal-Mart’s president and chief executive, Lee Scott. “Surely Walmart can identify a site that would meet its needs without changing the very character of the battlefield.”

The letter’s signatories include a who’s who of Civil War heavyweights: filmmaker Ken Burns, Pulitzer winner David McCullough, University of Virginia professor Garry Gallagher, Virginia Tech Center for Civil War Studies director James I. Robertson and other scholars from across the country.

“Every one of these modern intrusions on the historic landscape degrades the value and experience of that landscape,” said McPherson, who said that he has been to the proposed site and that a Wal-Mart store would take development in the area “a quantum leap higher.”

Keith Morris, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said that the company has looked at other locations in the area but that none was as attractive. “This is the site we’re going forward with,” Morris said, describing it as “an ideal location.” The land is already zoned for commercial use and targeted for development by Orange County, he said. “There is a void here in this immediate area, especially in retail growth.”

Preservation groups in Virginia have been generally successful in recent years in steering development projects away from battlefields or reaching compromises with builders that result in partial protection for historic sites. A 214-acre portion of the Chancellorsville battlefield, a few miles down the road from the proposed Wal-Mart, was acquired for preservation by the Civil War Preservation Trust between 2004 and 2006. And in Prince William County, 127 acres of the Bristoe Station battlefield’s core section were preserved in a 2002 deal with residential developers who wanted to put hundreds of houses there.

But that was before the current economic slump.

“I think economic downturns clarify some things,” said R. Mark Crawford, chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, which will ultimately decide on the proposal. “In this environment, to have a major retailer like Wal-Mart still want to come in is fairly significant, and not something we can be casual about.”

Johnson said he plans to support Wal-Mart and thinks a majority of the five-member board will vote to approve the supercenter. The company’s proposal first must be reviewed by county planners and state transportation officials, and then it will go to a public hearing, Johnson said. He said he expected the proposal to come before the supervisors for a vote between February and April.

Based on sales estimates, the Wal-Mart is expected to generate about $500,000 a year in tax revenue for Orange County. The county’s budget, including its school spending, is roughly $90 million, Johnson said, and tax revenue is falling.

“In order to have a healthy economy, you need retail in order to satisfy demand,” Johnson said. “If [the project] doesn’t happen in Orange County, it’ll happen in Spotsylvania County, and then we’ll lose that revenue.” There are three Wal-Mart stores in the Fredericksburg area, including Spotsylvania County, and one in Culpeper.

Opponents of the Wal-Mart plan said they are not against the company or its presence in Orange County, only its proposed location. They are urging Wal-Mart to build a few miles down the road, closer to the Lake of the Woods gated subdivision, which has about 4,000 residents and would be the store’s major source of customers.

“It’s got nothing to do with Wal-Mart,” said Jim Campi, spokesman for the Civil War Preservation Trust, the group leading the fight. “But this is the worst possible location. I believe this is the closest Wal-Mart has ever tried to build next to a national park.”

The Wilderness Battlefield is part of the National Park Service’s Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, which also includes the Chancellorsville Battlefield.

Wal-Mart spokesman Morris said the company should be judged only on the merits of its proposed store and not by other development that it might attract. “All we have control over is what we’re proposing,” he said. “Don’t criticize this plan because you’re afraid something will get built after that. We shouldn’t be held accountable because people’s real concern is future commercial development a year or five years down the road.”

The company has offered to place commemorative markers and other monuments to the battle at the supercenter. “There’s no reason why [the battlefield and the store] can’t coexist,” Morris said.

As for residents, some said they were willing to trade a little history for convenience.

“I think we need it here,” said Nina Hudson, who said she drives 30 to 40 miles round trip to shop at Wal-Mart in Culpeper or Fredericksburg.

“That’s the past, and we have to think about the future,” said Jackie Lee, who also lives near the proposed store. “The world’s growing, and you can’t stop that.”

Stuart Stevens, a naval police officer, said he’s dead set against the Wal-Mart. “They don’t care about history,” he said. “They just care about the almighty dollar.”

Earlier this month, not far from the proposed Wal-Mart site, the park superintendent, Russ Smith, and the park historian, Eric Mink, took a walk out to a headstone near Ellwood Manor, a 1790s house under restoration that served as headquarters for Union commanders during the battle. The view from the front porch had changed little in 150 years, encompassing mostly open fields, old barns and rolling hills.

“These are sacred spaces,” Smith said, worrying that visitors to the historic home would also face views of Wal-Mart.

The crudely cut headstone in a cornfield near the house is marked “Arm of Stonewall Jackson,” designating the spot where the general’s amputated arm was supposedly buried after his accidental and mortal wounding by his own men in the 1863 Chancellorsville battle.

The Park Service excavated the site but never found the arm, Smith said.

Let’s hope that this kind of publicity in a major newspaper like The Washington Post will help to mobilize opposition to the Wal-Mart project.

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About a month ago, I was contacted by the Civil War Preservation Trust to see whether I would be a signatory of a letter from concerned Civil War historians to the CEO of WalMart regarding the proposal to construct a WalMart superstore on a piece of the Wilderness battlefield.

The letter was released today, and it’s really quite remarkable. Over 250 historians have endorsed it. Here it is:

Mr. Lee Scott, President and CEO
Walmart Stores, Inc.
702 SW 8th Street
Bentonville, Arkansas 72716-8611

Dear Mr. Scott:

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to pursue alternate building locations for the Walmart Supercenter proposed in Orange County, Virginia. The site currently under consideration lies within the historic boundary of the Wilderness Battlefield and only one quarter mile from the current boundary of the Wilderness Battlefield unit of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

The Battle of the Wilderness was among the most significant engagements of the Civil War. It marked the first time legendary generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant faced off against one another on the field of battle. During two days of desperate conflict in a harsh, unforgiving landscape tangled with underbrush, 4,000 Americans lost their lives and nearly 20,000 were wounded.

The proposed location will greatly increase traffic through the area and encourage further development to encroach upon and spoil the battlefield. This, in turn, will seriously degrade the experience for the many tens of thousands of heritage tourists who visit this National Park every year. The Wilderness Battlefield is easily the biggest tourist attraction in Orange County, with visitors coming from around the world to experience its serenity and contemplate its history and significance.

As a historian, I feel strongly that the Wilderness Battlefield is a unique historic and cultural treasure deserving careful stewardship. Currently only approximately 20 percent of the battlefield is protected by the National Park Service. If built, this Walmart would seriously undermine ongoing efforts to see more of this historic land preserved and deny future generations the opportunity to wander a landscape that has, until now, remained largely unchanged since 1864.

The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved. Surely Walmart can identify a site that would meet its needs without changing the very character of the battlefield.

There are many places in central Virginia to build a commercial development, but there is only one Wilderness Battlefield. Please respect our great nation’s history and move your store farther away from this historic site and National Park.

Signed,

Terrie Aamodt, Walla Walla University
Edward D. Abrahams, Silver Spring, Md.
Sean P. Adams, University of Florida
Garry Adelman, History Associates, Inc.
Nicholas Aieta, the Marlborough School, West Springfield, Mass.
A.J. Aiseirithe, Washington, D.C.
James Anderson, Ashburn, Va.
Adam Arenson, University of Texas
Jonathan M. Atkins, Berry College
Arthur H. Auten, University of Hartford
David Bard, Concord College
Alwyn Barr, Texas Tech University
Craig A. Bauer, Metairie, La.
Erik Bauer, West Hollywood, Calif.
Dale Baum, Texas A&M University
Edwin C. Bearss, Historian emeritus, National Park Service
Caryn Cosse Bell, University of Massachusetts at Lowell
Jeffrey R. Bennett, Waterford, N.Y.
Shannon Bennett, Ellettsville, Ind.
Melvyn S. Berger, Newton, Mass.
Arthur W. Bergeron, Shippensburg, Pa.
Edward H. Bergerstrom, Port Richey, Fla.
Eugene H. Berwanger, Colorado State University
Fred W. Beuttler, Deputy Historian, U.S. House of Representatives
Darrel Bigham, University of Southern Indiana
John Bloom, Las Cruces, N.M.
Frederick J. Blue, Youngstown State University
Christopher Bobal, Lees Summit, Mo.
Thomas Bockhorn, Huntsville, Ala.
Keith Bohannon, University of West Georgia
Phillip S. Bolger, San Diego, Calif.
Patrick Boyd, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
Vernon S. Braswell, Corpus Christi, Tex.
Roger D. Bridges, Bloomington, Ill.
Ronald S. Brockway, Regis University
Col. George M. Brooke, III, USMC (Ret.), Lexington, Va.
Bruce A. Brown, Cypress, Calif.
Norman D. Brown, University of Texas, Austen, Tex.
David Brush, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
Jim Burgess, Manassas National Battlefield, Va.
Ken Burns, Walpole, N.H.
Brian Burton, Ferndale, Wash.
Victoria Bynum, Texas State University-San Marcos
Peter S. Carmichael, West Virginia University
Marius M. Carriere, Christian Brothers University
Katherine Cassioppi, National-Louis University
Gary Casteel, Lexington, Va.
Jane Turner Censer, George Mason University
William Cheek, San Diego State University
John Cimprich, Thomas More College
Thomas G. Clemens, Hagerstown Community College
Leon F. Cohn, Plantation, Fla.
Thomas B. Colbert, Marshalltown Community College
James R. Connor, Chancellor emeritus University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
William J. Cooper, Jr., Louisiana State University
Janet L. Coryell, Western Michigan University
Charles E. Coulter, Yankton, S.D.
Robert E. Curran, Richmond, Ky.
Thomas F. Curran, Saint Louis, Mo.
Gordon E. Dammann, National Museum of Civil War Medicine
Guy Stephen Davis, Atlanta, Ga.
Joseph G. Dawson, III, Texas A&M University
Mary DeCredico, United States Naval Academy
James Lyle DeMarce, Arlington, Va.
Charles B. Dew, Williams College
Steven Deyle, University of Houston
Richard DiNardo, Marine Corps Command and Staff College
Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego, Warwick, N.Y.
Richard R. Duncan, Alexandria, Va.
Kenneth Durr, History Associates, Inc.
David Dykstra, Poolesville, Md.
Mark Elliott, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Robert F. Engs, University of Pennsylvania
C. Wyatt Evans, Drew University
Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee
Rex H. Felton, Tiffin, Ohio
Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School
Jeff Fioravanti, Lynn, Mass.
Joseph C. Fitzharris, University of Saint Thomas
J.K. Folmarm California, Minn.
George B. Forgie, University of Texas Austin
Lee W. Formwalt, Organization of American Historians
Janet B. Frazer, Narberth, Pa.
Garry W. Gallagher, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
Jonathan Gantt, Columbia College
Jason Gart, History Associates, Inc.
Louis S. Gerteis, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Kate C. Gillin, the Pomfret School, Pomfret, Conn.
Mary Giunta, Edinburg, Va.
Martin K. Gordon, Columbia, Md.
Cathy Gorn, University of Maryland
Thomas M. Grace, Amherst, N.Y.
Susan W. Gray, Severna Park, Md.
A. Wilson Greene, Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier
Debra F. Greene, Jefferson City, Mo.
Jim Griffin, Frisco, Tex.
Linda J. Guy, Clearville, Pa.
Edward J. Hagerty, American Military University
Alfred W. Hahn, Midlothian, Va.
Judith Lee Hallock, South Setauket, N.Y.
Jerry Harlow, President, Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation
D. Scott Hartwig, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa.
David S. Heidler, Colorado State University
Jeannie Heidler, United States Air Force Academy
John S. Heiser, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pa.
Earl J. Hess, Lincoln Memorial University
Libra Hilde, San Jose State University
T. John Hillmer, Jr., Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Mo.
David Hochfelder, State University of New York – Albany
Sylvia Hoffert, Texas A&M University
Patrick Hotard, Philadelphia, Pa.
Richard Houston, Harwich, Mass.
Randal L. Hoyer, Madonna University
Richard L. Hutchison, Fort Worth, Tex.
Brian M. Ingrassia, Georgia State University
Perry D. Jamieson, Crofton, Md.
Jim Jobe, Fort Donelson National Battlefield, Tenn.
Willie Ray Johnson, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, Ga.
Vivian Lee Joyner, New Hill, N.C.
Whitmel M. Joyner, New Hill, N.C.
Walter D. Kamphoefner, Texas A&M University
Amalie M. Kass, Harvard Medical School
Philip M. Katz, Washington, D.C.
Brad Keefer, Kent State University
Brian J. Kenny, Denver, Co.
Victoria A. Kin, San Antonio, Tex.
George W. Knepper, University of Akron
Christopher Kolakowski, National Museum of the U.S. Army Reserve
Carl E. Kramer, Indiana University Southeast
Arnold Krammer, Texas A&M University
Robert K. Krick, Fredericksburg, Va.
Michael E. Krivdo, Texas A&M University
Benjamin Labaree, Saint Alban’s School, Washington, D.C.
Dan Laney, Austin, Tex.
Connie Langum, Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Mo.
William P. Leeman, Coventry, R.I.
Kevin Levin, Charlottesville, Va.
Richard G. Lowe, University of North Texas
Robert W. Lowery, Jr., Newport News, Va.
M. Philip Lucas, Cornell College
R. Wayne Mahood, Geneseo, N.Y.
Daniel Martin, Lancaster, Pa.
William Marvel, South Conway, N.H.
Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University
Dinah M. Mayo-Bobee, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
George T. Mazuzan, Springfield, Va.
Nathan McAlister, Hoyt, Kan.
David McCullough
Dennis K. McDaniel, Washington, D.C.
James M. McPherson, Princeton University
Kathleen G. McKesson, Eighty Four, Pa.
James G. Mendez, Chicago, Ill.
Brian Craig Miller, Emporia State University
Roger E. Miller, Eagle River, Alaska.
Wilbur R. Miller, State University of New York – Stony Brook
Eric J. Mink, Fredericksburg, Va.
Robert E. Mitchell, Brookline, Mass.
John Moody, Orange Park, Fla.
Richard Moore, Woodbridge, Va.
Richard Morey, Kent Place School, Summit, N.J.
Geoffrey Morrison, Saint Louis, Mo.
Brenda Murray, North Pole, Alaska.
Richard J. Myers, Doylestown, Pa.
Eric Nedergaard, Mesa, Ariz.
Robert D. Neuleib, Normal, Ill.
Kenneth Noe, Auburn University
Justin Oakley, Martinsville, Ind.
Kristen Oertel, Millsaps College
Marvin Olson, La Crescenta, Ca.
Beverly Palmer, Claremont, Ca.
John T. Payne, Lone Star College
Graham Peck, Saint Xavier University
William D. Pederson, Louisiana State University, Shreveport
William E. Pellerin, Santa Barbara, Ca.
Don Pfanz, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, Va.
Michael Pierson, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Kermit J. Pike, Western Reserve Historical Society, Mentor, Ohio
Ann Poe, Alexandria, Va.
Kieth Ploakoff, Rossmoor, Ca.
Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
Adam J. Pratt. Baton Rouge, La.
Gerald Prokopowicz, East Carolina University
John Quist, Shippensburg University
Steven J. Rauch, Evans, Ga.
S. Waite Rawls, III, Museum of the Confederacy
Carol Reardon, Pennsylvania State University
Douglas Reasner, Durant, Iowa
Michael Reis, History Associates, Inc.
Robert V. Remini, Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives
James Renberg, Southern Pines, N.C.
Gordon Rhea, Mount Pleasant, S.C.
Jean Richardson, Buffalo State College
Jeffrey Richman, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Harris D. Riley, Jr., M.D., Nashville, Tenn.
James I. Robertson, Jr., Virginia Tech
Stephen I. Rockenbach, Virginia State University
Sylvia Rodrigue, Baton Rouge, La.
Rodney A. Ross, Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, D.C.
Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, Johnson Space Center
Jeffrey J. Safford, Montana State University
Frank Scaturro, New Hyde Park, N.Y.
Mark S. Schantz, Hendrix College
Laurence D. Schiller, Deerfield, Ill.
Christopher A. Schnell, Springfield, Ill.
Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, Springfield, Ill.
Frederick Schult, Jr., New York University
Donald L. Schupp, Warrenton, Va.
Richard D. Schwartz, Morristown, N.J.
Cynthia Seacord, Schenectady, N.Y.
Tomas Seaver, Woonsocket, R.I.
Diane Shalda, Chicago Military Academy
Peter D. Sheridan, Torrance, Ca.
Mark Snyder, Akron, Ohio
John Sotak, O.S.A., New Lenox, Ill.
Clay W. Stuckey, DDS, Bedford, Ind.
Carlyn Swaim, History Associates, Inc.
Andrew Talkov, Virginia Historical Society
Robert A. Taylor, Florida Institute of Technology
Paul H. Tedesco, Northeastern University
James Thayer, Milford, Mass.
Emory M. Thomas, University of Georgia
JoAnne Thomas, Peoria, Ill.
Joseph Trent, Worcester, Mass.
Tony R. Trimble, Plainfield, Ind.
I. Bruce Turner, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Edwin C. Ulmer, Jr., Feasterville, Pa.
Charles W. Van Adder, Forked River, N.J.
Charles Vincent, Baker, La.
Joseph F. von Deck, Ashburnham, Ma.
Brent Vosburg, Elizabethtown, N.J.
Robert Voss, Lincoln, Neb.
George N. Vourlojianis, Lorain County Community College
Christopher R. Waldrep, San Francisco State University
John Weaver, Tipp City, Ohio
Robert Welch, Ames, Iowa
Lowell E. Wenger, Cincinnati, Ohio
Jeffrey Wert, Centre Hall, Pa.
Bruce E. Wilburn, Glen Allen, Va.
Diana I. Williams, Wellesley College
Mary Williams, Fort Davis National Historic Site, Tex.
Terry Winschel, Vicksburg National Military Park, Miss.
Roger Winthrop, Lansing, Mich.
Eric J. Wittenberg, Columbus, Ohio
Ralph A. Wooster, Lamar University
Donald Yacovone, Harvard University
Shirley J. Yee, University of Washington
Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives and Records Administration
William D. Young, Maple Woods Community College
Mary E. Younger, Dayton, Ohio
Jack Zevin, Queens College, City University of New York

To my readers: you may not be a historian, and you may not have signed this letter. However, you have a voice, and you can make it heard. Please take the time to send a letter to Mr. Scott imploring him to find another location for this store. We have plenty of WalMarts. We only have one Wilderness.

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From today’s issue of the Chester, VA Village News:

Historical Park Soon to Close Doors to Public

Dec 3, 2008 – 12:32:55 PM

Effective January 2, 2009, Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Dinwiddie County will be open by reservation only. Guests wishing to visit the Park may do so by making a reservation forty-eight hours in advance. Admission fees for non-members will be $100 for a group of up to ten people, and $10 per adult for groups of more than ten. Park members may make reservations twenty-four hours in advance with no minimum numbers and no admission fee.

The Park will continue to offer all reservation-based programming as usual, including its popular school field trips, battlefield tours, Annual Symposium, Civil War Adventure Camps, Summer Teacher Institutes, and History Day Camps.

“The severe economic downturn has undercut the ability of the Pamplin Foundation to support the Park at current levels,” says Pamplin Historical Park President, A. Wilson Greene. “We deeply regret the necessity to curtail normal daily operations to meet this new fiscal reality.”

None of the Park’s four museums will be altered and the Park will continue to maintain its four historic structures, ten reconstructed buildings, and three miles of interpretive trails. There will be no changes to the Park’s extensive artifact collection. “Should economic conditions improve, we hope to restore some regular public operating hours next spring,” adds Greene.

The Park will continue to accelerate its use of the internet to fulfill its educational mission through on-line programming. Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier preserves 422 acres near Petersburg, Virginia, including the Breakthrough Battlefield, a National Historic Landmark. It is owned and operated by the Pamplin Foundation of Portland, Oregon. The Park opened in 1994 as Pamplin Park Civil War Site and debuted the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in 1999, when it adopted its current name.

Pamplin Park, which is funded by the Pamplin Family Foundation (the Pamplins are the majority shareholders of the company that owns and operates Boise Pacific), has, for more than a decade, been the model of an upscale Civil War battlefield with a state-of-the-art museum and an excellent bookstore. The park features the spot where Union troops broke Robert E. Lee’s lines at Petersburg on April 2, 1865, meaning it includes some critical ground. It always made its neighbor, the Petersburg National Battlefield, look like its poor red-headed stepchild little brother.

Now, even Pamplin Park is suffering as a consequence of the economy, which is tragic. The Petersburg Campaign, which gets little enough attention from historians and the public, will get even less attention now that Pamplin Park will no longer be available to the public on a regular basis. And that’s a tragedy.

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J. D. Petruzzi has an interesting but sad post on his blog today regarding the destruction of the stone wall that was the focus of some fairly bitter fighting between troopers of Brig. Gen. David M. Gregg’s Second Cavalry Division and the Stonewall Brigade of Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Second Corps for several hours late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863. JD also points out that the landowners have re-graded the ground to the east of where the wall stood and have changed the historic lay of the land.

That stone wall became the linchpin to the position, and, at one point, there was literally a race between troopers of the 10th New York and 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry regiments and soldiers of the 2nd Virginia Infantry as to who would seize and hold the wall. At the time, the wall was waist-high and served as a very strong natural breastwork that sheltered whichever side held it. The dismounted Federal horse soldiers won the race and held the position for the rest of the fight.

The wall itself began at the intersection of the Hanover Road and Hoffman Road, which runs perpendicular to the Hanover Road, and extended north for fifty yards or so. Due to erosion and settling dirt and plant growth, the wall was hard to find, but it was still there. If you knew where it was, it was easy to find. I used to love standing on it to interpret the fighting on Brinkerhoff’s Ridge. It was very cool knowing that I was standing on the spot that was the focal point of the fighting I was describing at that very moment.

Old friend Stan O’Donnell, who has a place right next to East Cavalry Field, had let me know that the owner of the property had cleaned up a lot of brush and had cut down scrub trees that blocked the view from Brinkerhoff’s Ridge to the battlefield at East Cavalry Field. Without that stuff in the way, you can clearly see the Michigan Cavalry Brigade monument and the Cavalry Shaft from Brinkerhoff’s Ridge, which makes the interpretation of the Brinkerhoff’s Ridge much easier. That part is good news.

The senseless and needless destruction of that historic stone wall and the regrading of the ground to the east of it, on the other hand, is not good news at all.

As I said in the comment that I left on JD’s blog, this sort of thing is tragic, but it’s probably also unavoidable. The march of progress goes on, no matter what. So long as that wall was in private hands, the threat of this sort of thing was always there. Thus, when JD called me to tell me the bad news, I was bummed, but I cannot honestly say that I was terribly surprised.

It’s tragic, but there are so many important sites associated with the Battle of Gettysburg that lay outside the park boundary that this sort of thing is, unfortunately, inevitable. Given my personal connection with this piece of the battlefield, I am especially disappointed that this happened and that the lay of the land and the stone wall will never be the same again.

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This excellent article from today’s issue of The Washington Post does a great job of explaining why I support the efforts of the Civil War Preservation Trust:

McMansionizing History: Can anyone save some of the Civil War’s most important battlefields?

By John A. Farrell
Sunday, November 16, 2008; Page W14

In 1964, Michael Shaara, a frustrated writer of little-known fiction, took his wife and children on a road trip to the World’s Fair in New York. On their way home, they stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park, where a fine statue of Robert E. Lee guards the western reach of the famous battlefield.

The statue marks the area where, on July 3, 1863, Confederate Gen. George Pickett led some 13,000 men out from the shelter of the woods and up the long slope of Cemetery Ridge. Shaara and his 12-year-old son, Jeff, followed the path of Pickett’s men, across undulating ground and a fence at Emmitsburg Road. As they climbed the ridge, Michael Shaara told stories to his son. He recounted how Pennsylvanians had done what Lee did not think they’d do that day: They’d fought and died in defense of their state’s soil. He spoke of Confederate Gen. Lewis Armistead and Union Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, great friends before the war, and how they lay bleeding, yards apart, not knowing the other was near. And when the Shaaras got to the small stone monument that marks the dirt where Armistead was mortally wounded, the boy was stunned to see his father weeping.

“What happened to my father, walking the ground at Gettysburg, changed his life,” Jeff Shaara remembers. “He became obsessed with telling that story.”

It took Michael Shaara seven years to complete “The Killer Angels,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975, but not a wide audience. It was only in the wake of Ken Burns’s wildly popular 1990 PBS documentary series, “The Civil War,” that a faithful adaptation of Shaara’s book was filmed, propelling “The Killer Angels” to the top of the bestseller lists and establishing a family franchise. Michael Shaara, who died in 1988, never knew the success that Jeff has had with a series of novels that, in the style of his father, revisit the Civil War, the American Revolution and other storied clashes.

“It is a testament to the power of that ground,” Shaara says, remembering when he climbed Cemetery Ridge with his dad. “There is no substitute for coming out by the Lee statue, looking out across that mile of open ground and then walking it yourself. And realizing it is not that Hollywood stuff where guys charge, sort of screaming and yelling and lickety-split. No. They walked. One step at a time.”

Last summer, Shaara was asked to join the board of trustees of the Civil War Preservation Trust, whose calling is to save battlegrounds from bulldozers as sprawl creeps beyond the suburbs of Washington, Richmond and other cities with historic land nearby. The trust was formed in 1999, when the two small and troubled private groups merged and chose a onetime Maryland politico — Jim Lighthizer — to serve as president.

Lighthizer has built the trust into an effective organization that is part conservation fund, part lobbying shop, part political pit bull. He is not afraid to take the tools of modern politics — polling, direct mail, media — into battle with developers, and defeat them.

When the trust asked for Shaara’s help, “I listened long and hard,” the author says, “because this is a huge time commitment.” In the end, Lighthizer won him over. “He is the energy behind this.”

Which is noteworthy, because, when I ask Lighthizer what triggered his love for Civil War battlefields, he goes back to a day in 1983 when he asked a friend to recommend a book to take on vacation. Lighthizer was skeptical of his pal’s suggestion. “I don’t read novels. I read history,” he says. But the friend persevered, and in Nags Head, N.C., that summer, Lighthizer read “The Killer Angels.”

“It lit something that can best be defined as between a passion and an obsession,” he says.

The ground had inspired a story; the story a man, to save the ground.

“When I took the job… did I say we were going to start a political organization? No,” Lighthizer says. “But as the facts presented themselves, I recognized if we don’t get political, we are not going to be in business.”

He and I are driving down Interstate 95, heading toward Fredericksburg, Va., the small town on the Rappahannock River where, along a 10-mile arc, the Union and Confederate armies fought four legendary battles — Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House — from December 1862 through May 1864. Lighthizer is behind the wheel of an SUV: a pale-skinned, freckled man of medium height and build, with thinning reddish hair, expressive features and a sometimes goofy grin. The singular feature of his personality, a sly candor, won him the affection of the Maryland press corps during his eight years as Anne Arundel’s county executive and four years as transportation secretary under then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

He is a Democrat who delights in political incorrectness. He recalls — jokingly, I believe — that when one deal to protect a battlefield was hung up over the fate of the feral cats that inhabited the property, he toyed with the notion of delivering a few feline corpses, like the horse’s head in “The Godfather,” to the animal-loving landowner’s doorstep.

Lighthizer’s political acumen and deal-making skills have been put to the test trying to save the “hallowed ground” where more than 600,000 Americans lost their lives.

For a century after the Civil War, there was little cause to fret about its battlegrounds. In recent decades, that has changed. Entire battlefields have been lost to sprawl in Franklin, Tenn., and Atlanta. From the red clay around Richmond, developments with names such as Stonewall Estates have sprouted where Lee stopped the Union drive to capture the Confederate capital in 1862. Even the historic vistas at Antietam and Gettysburg have been put at risk, as the tendrils of exurban Washington creep into Western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. In 1997, the federal government’s Civil War Sites Advisory Commission published an updated survey of 384 “principal” battlegrounds and warned: “This nation’s Civil War heritage is in grave danger. It is disappearing under buildings, parking lots, and highways. We may lose fully two-thirds of the principal battlefields.”

“I will give you an example,” Lighthizer says. “You know about Pickett’s Charge? It was a charge by 13,000 men, more or less, across a mile of open ground, supported by artillery, attacking a wall. What do you know about the Battle of Franklin? Well, it was an attack by 25,000 men — twice the number — over two miles of open ground, with no artillery support against a heavily fortified line, with significantly more casualties.

“And you know why most people haven’t heard about Franklin? Because they paved it over.”

The route we travel down I-95 offers compelling proof. For years, it was a lightly populated stretch of pine woods, creeks and rivers. Now, with its housing developments, malls and outlet stores, the land is being consumed at a rapid pace. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, six are in Virginia, including Prince William, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties along the I-95 corridor. The boom has generated a backlash. Development-friendly county officials are being pressured by new residents, who want additional open space, fewer traffic jams and better planning.

Under Lighthizer, the trust has found ways to tap that slow-growth sentiment, which is ironic, given that Lighthizer presided over a period of rapid development as a county executive in the 1980s and as transportation secretary in the 1990s. Back then, contributions from developers fueled his political campaigns. In Anne Arundel, he concedes, “we issued 3,000 building permits a year, in some years.”

Yet, in a way, this makes Lighthizer a cunning soldier in the war he’s now waging against development. When he arrived at the trust, he recognized that his group could not outbid developers, who were inflating the value of land from about $2,000 an acre to as much as $40,000 an acre. “They would price us out of existence,” he says. “But the land-use process at the local level is often very political. I knew how to stop rezoning.” He had seen it done by determined residents who had sometimes thwarted projects he’d supported. “You can aggressively, as we have done, start grass-roots efforts to put the pressure on local officials.

“If we can compromise, we will do it — and have done it,” Lighthizer says. “But if we engage [developers] in battle, we want to make the battle so nasty and so brutal that even if we lose, they won’t ever want to cross our path again.

“Like somebody said after the Chancellorsville fight: Now all we have to do is bark.”

“This is the Zoan ridge,” says Robert Krick, who served as the National Park Service’s chief historian for some of Virginia’s most important battlefields before retiring several years ago. “It is the highest ground from here, eastward, to somewhere in France. Wonderful high ground. And just in front of you is where — when Joe Hooker did not have the nerve to come out of the Wilderness and take this dominating high ground — Stonewall Jackson bared his teeth, and Hooker collapsed upon himself.”

After Lighthizer and I pick up Krick up at the park’s headquarters, the three of us stand at the point where the sprawling housing developments and strip malls of greater Fredericksburg rub up against Chancellorsville Battlefield.

In the spring of 1863, swaggering Union Gen. Joe Hooker launched an ambitious assault on the Confederates. He sent part of his army across the Rappahannock just south of Fredericksburg. A second wing of the Union forces swung north and west, crossed the river, came down through the scrub woods known locally as the Wilderness and arrived behind the unsuspecting and outnumbered Rebels, halting that night at a 70-acre clearing at the small country crossroads called Chancellorsville. Hooker was jubilant. “Our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him,” he told his troops.

Lee responded by dividing his army and attacking Hooker on his own ground, as the Union general had predicted. On the morning of May 1, the armies clashed at the Zoan ridge, where, after a spirited battle, the Union general inexplicably ordered his men back into the Wilderness. Recognizing a psychological advantage, Lee divided his army again and sent Stonewall Jackson on a sweeping march around Hooker’s right flank, which ended in a surprise Confederate assault at dusk. The shock of the attack sent the Union forces reeling back to the river, though it cost Jackson his life — he was shot by his own troops in the chaos and gloom. The fighting at the Zoan ridge was the opening act in what historian Shelby Foote called “in terms of glory the greatest” of all Confederate victories.

“The fighting through here was not Armageddon but it was very significant because it pushed Hooker back,” Krick says. “And all of this land would be paved or covered with houses today, but Jim Lighthizer saved it.”

Lighthizer came to the preservation movement as a sportsman. He is a lifelong hunter, an Ohio boy who put himself through Georgetown University law school by selling typewriters for IBM. Inspired by John F. Kennedy, Lighthizer ventured into Democratic politics and won a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1978. He was elected Anne Arundel County executive in 1982 and inherited a budget seeping red ink. He capped wages for Anne Arundel’s teachers and other public employees and encouraged development to grow the county’s tax base. By the end of his first term, he was able to cut property taxes and introduce a “smart growth” plan that satisfied the public yearning for containing sprawl. It had the added benefit, he says with a smile, of pressuring developers to donate to his campaign. He faced no real opposition for reelection.

Anne Arundel County is famed for its Colonial capital, Annapolis, and for hundreds of miles of shoreline on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Historic preservation, environmental protection and “quality of life” are huge issues there. Awash in revenue, Lighthizer let the conservationist in him blossom in his second term. He spent millions of dollars buying parkland on the rivers and bay. A lasting legacy of his tenure as county executive is the $17 million Quiet Waters riverfront park, near Annapolis, on 340 acres that he snatched from developers.

Lighthizer had a reputation for cockiness, fueled by the embarrassing disclosure that, as his second term ended, he had spent more than $100,000 of public funds on a glossy, 96-page, self-aggrandizing booklet titled “The Lighthizer Years.” Nevertheless, when he left in 1990, limited by law to only two consecutive terms, he was viewed as a potential candidate for higher office.

As state transportation secretary, he presided over the arrival of Southwest Airlines at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, a development that tripled flights and transformed the airport into a big-league operation. He won praise from conservationists for exploiting a clause in the massive 1991 federal transportation bill and using highway “enhancement” monies for battlefield preservation. At Antietam and other battlefields, the state spent more than $16 million to acquire land and conservation easements. The money, coupled with other open-space efforts, left Antietam, site of the war’s single bloodiest day of fighting, one of the nation’s best-preserved battlegrounds.

Then came a time of personal and professional ordeal. After Lighthizer became transportation secretary, state and federal investigators began scrutinizing several land deals that had been sanctioned by his administration during his time as county executive. Though no charges were filed, the investigations were an embarrassment.

They were followed by something far worse. In February 1993, a state trooper found Lighthizer’s son Robert, named in honor of Robert F. Kennedy, dead in a state park. The 23-year-old Army veteran, and former all-county lacrosse player, committed suicide. His son’s death “took a tremendous amount out of me,” Lighthizer says. “I went, in the course of a year, from thinking of running for governor to getting out of the business. I just decided I didn’t want to do this anymore.”

Instead Lighthizer went to work as a lobbyist in Annapolis, representing Southwest Airlines and other clients for the Baltimore law firm Miles & Stockbridge. He quickly came to detest his new duties. “If you want a lesson in humility, go from being county executive and transportation secretary to chasing state legislators up and down the hall,” he says. “I hated to go to work. I was making more money than I ever made in my life, and I was less happy, professionally, than ever. And in the end, I didn’t care if they got a comma in the tax bill.”

Lighthizer seemed on course to become just one more Maryland political hack. It was his obsession with the Civil War that rescued him from that fate.

Starting in 1890,Congress authorized the creation of the first four national military parks — at Chickamauga, Shiloh, Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But, over time, even major battlefields suffered from chronic federal budget shortfalls. At Fredericksburg, for example, the northernmost stretch was overrun by housing; the southern sector by an industrial park and a General Motors factory; and what’s known as the Slaughter Pen Farm, at the center of the battleground, was zoned for commercial or industrial development.

Over the years, the federal bureaucracies “lost deals because they couldn’t get appropriations, and they lost deals because they moved so goddamn slow when they had the money,” Lighthizer says. “And a lot of the important battlefield land is outside the Park Service boundaries, because the boundaries are arbitrary. They are political.”

Slaughter Pen Farm is outside the boundaries. “Some farmer went to his congressman 50 years ago and said: ‘Screw you. Don’t put me in that battlefield. I don’t want to be in it,’ ” Lighthizer says. “And so it’s not.”

At Chancellorsville, the federal government owns all but 1,703 acres of the 7,517-acre “core area” of the battleground, “where the heaviest fighting took place,” says Russ Smith, the Park Service superintendent there. The greater, federally recognized “study area,” which includes land on which the armies maneuvered or set up camps and field hospitals, is 21,874 acres. The threat of development led to the founding of aggressive local groups in Gettysburg, Northern Virginia and other locales, as well as two national organizations — the Civil War Trust and the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites — to buy land. But their efforts were unfocused, and by the end of the 1990s, the preservation association was $7 million in debt. Lighthizer was on the board of the Civil War Trust when the two groups merged in 1999, and the new trustees asked him to serve as president. There were 24 employees at the trust when Lighthizer took office; only four remained after six months. The rest were fired or left on their own. To replace them, Lighthizer tapped a community of battlefield buffs to find young professionals who had experience running political campaigns, congressional offices or commercial real estate operations. With the help of well-connected trustees and donors, he put his lobbying skills to work in Congress and state legislatures and retired the $7 million debt.

“We never ask for outright grants. Everything, we match,” he says. “I was in government. I know that when people come in with their hand out, you want them to have some skin in the game. So I say: ‘Lookit. You give me a million, and I will make it two. And, by the way, I will give the land back to you, if you want it.’ It’s a good argument.”

Membership in the trust tripled. A new direct-mail program brought in millions of dollars. And more than 20,000 acres of land at storied places — Manassas, Fredericksburg, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Brandy Station, Malvern Hill — were bought outright or saved via conservation easements, which give landowners tax breaks for giving up the right to develop their properties.

Buying property from willing sellers was one thing. It was quite another to rescue land that had already been purchased by developers and designated for high-density residential and commercial growth. Lighthizer accepted that challenge at what became known as “the second battle of Chancellorsville.”

The first volleys were fired in 2002 after the Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors voted to move the Zoan ridge property out of the county’s rural preserve and into its “primary settlement” district, thus opening the land for high-density development. In June, the Dogwood Development Group of Reston announced plans to build a town center on the spot, with more than 2,000 homes and 2.4 million square feet of commercial space. In November, the county planning commission approved the developer’s plan, dismissing the growth-related concerns of a large crowd of local residents who waited hours to testify. When Lighthizer tried to negotiate, the developer and the county government ignored him. Furious, he decided to fight the development by orchestrating public pressure and, if necessary, defeating the pro-development supervisors at the polls.

“Nothing we have ever done compares to this. Nothing,” Lighthizer wrote in a fundraising letter to his membership. “If you never give another dollar to help save another battlefield, I need you to help with this one. If we succeed not only will we save 140 essential acres at Chancellorsville, but in years to come, savvy developers will think twice about going head to head against us they’ll go build their strip malls somewhere else.”

The Coalition to Save Chancellorsville Battlefield was formed that summer. A pollster was hired to gauge community sentiment, and the results (showing that almost two-thirds of nearby residents opposed the development) were released to local news outlets. The coalition held news conferences and lured national media such as Washington Post columnist George Will and National Public Radio to report on the controversy. Volunteers conducted a petition drive, collecting 27,000 signatures from residents who opposed the development. They canvassed neighborhoods, distributed leaflets and yard signs, held candlelight vigils and attended public hearings. A Web site kept the anti-growth forces alert to fresh developments, and served as a community rallying point. There were radio ads and a direct-mail appeal.

Dogwood fought back with telemarketing and mailings of its own, dismissing the 1863 action on the Zoan ridge as a “skirmish” that could suitably be honored with a small “memorial park.”

“These outsiders think they know what’s best for you,” the developers’ political action committee said in a mailing to area residents. “They came from places like New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania. They’ve never been stuck in our traffic, worried about improving our schools, or had to travel out of the county to spend their money to shop.”

But the coalition’s efforts had transformed the political climate. That fall, the voters filled a vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors with a candidate endorsed by the slow-growth forces: Robert Hagan got 64 percent of the vote. In January, when they had to fill a vacancy on the board, the supervisors selected Hap Connors, one of the coalition leaders. Then, in March 2003, as hundreds of county residents sat watching, the increasingly nervous supervisors voted 6 to 0 to reject the Dogwood proposal. The revolution peaked on Election Day 2003, when five pro-preservation candidates were elected supervisors, giving the movement control of the board.

The trust found a local homebuilder, Tricord Inc., that was willing to deal. In 2005, according to the trust, Tricord purchased 227 acres of the Dogwood property for more than $12 million and immediately transferred the 140 most important acres to Lighthizer’s group for $3 million. In return, the coalition forces and the supervisors agreed to let the builder put higher-density housing on the remaining 87 acres. In late 2006, the supervisors unanimously approved a second deal, along the same lines, with another builder, Toll Brothers. That $1 million sale, which closed this year, gave the trust another critical 74 acres of the battlefield.

“We don’t fool ourselves that the average American is a Civil War buff,” says Lighthizer. “But we do know they are tired of traffic, of congestion, of homes going up everywhere.”

The trust’s political muscle yielded further dividends. When the last major undeveloped tract at Fredericksburg — Slaughter Pen Farm — went on the market in 2006, Lighthizer was alerted by his friends at Tricord, who agreed to move quickly and buy the land, then flip it without profit to the trust. The $12.5 million price tag made the 208-acre deal his organization’s most ambitious and expensive purchase yet, but Lighthizer was willing to borrow to buy such a crucial piece of land. It is the only place on the battlefield where a visitor can follow in the footsteps of the Union assault from start to finish, now that land to the north and south has been developed.

Another coup occurred in 2006, when the trust rescued the 319-acre heart of another endangered tract — the Glendale Battlefield in Henrico County, Va. — for $4.1 million.

It was in the last days of summer in 2006, amid that string of triumphs at work, that Jim Lighthizer lost another of his three sons.

Conor Lighthizer, 28, died during a camping trip with his father high in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Free from the demands of politics, and seared by Robert’s suicide, Lighthizer had worked at spending more time with his four remaining children. During the years of late-night campaign banquets and budget sessions, weekend bull roasts and wining and dining lawmakers, “I didn’t ignore my children,” he says, “but if I knew — if I was as mature as I am now — I would have spent more time with them.” The camping trips were one of his ways of compensating for that lost time.

Conor suffered from juvenile diabetes but worked hard to keep himself in shape. He had completed a marathon that year. But illness or altitude triggered a diabetes-related condition called ketoacidosis at the end of a long climb. Conor lost strength, his sight and then consciousness at their alpine campsite. A helicopter came too late to save him.

“Conor died in my arms,” Lighthizer says, recounting the story in his office at the trust. His face is suddenly distorted; he is chagrined by an involuntary sob and apologizes, needlessly. “How close to the surface the emotions are,” he says, startled and marveling.

Grief can be relentless. It strips from us our distractions — ambition, creativity, desire — and their power to charm. We confront the great lie of life, and if we are fortunate, we fall on the crumbs of a cause for which to soldier on.

“You go on because you have no choice,” Lighthizer says. “You try to help the other people who are hurting, and not spend a lot of time on yourself.”

But some friends wonder if, as the battle between preservation and development comes to a fierce conclusion in the next few years, Lighthizer will be able to recapture the verve and vigor he displayed in the last decade.

In 1889, an old soldier named Joshua Chamberlain returned to Gettysburg for the dedication of a monument to the 20th Maine Regiment, which he commanded during the battle. Chamberlain is one of the heroes in “The Killer Angels.” He and his raw farm boys and fishermen were posted at the far end of the Union line, on the slope of a rocky height called Little Round Top, when the Confederates launched their attack. If the soldiers from Maine had given way, the federal line may well have collapsed. They knew that, and fought with fury. When they ran out of ammunition, they threw rocks and, at Chamberlain’s order, charged down the hill with bayonets, stunning the rebels and saving the hill.

On the day he returned to Gettysburg, Chamberlain spoke of the wisdom of saving battlefields. “In great deeds, something abides,” he said. “On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass. Bodies disappear, but spirits linger.” Future generations, he predicted, “shall come to this deathless field. And lo! The shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.” It did for Michael and Jeff Shaara. It has for Jim Lighthizer, who dreams of raising $250 million — twice what he has spent so far — to preserve another 25,000 acres of Civil War history in the next eight years. “I could spend, conservatively in the next five years, $30-to-$50 million to save land just in Spotsylvania County,” he says. At Chancellorsville, one-fourth of the core battlefield and less than one-tenth of the total ground has been protected. “Give me $10 million, and I will spend it at a fair market value to save that battlefield,” Lighthizer vows.

The 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War is approaching, but federal and state plans for the 2011 Sesquicentennial are modest. None calls for the kind of investment that Lighthizer and other preservationists believe is needed to protect the places where so many died. Meanwhile, time is running out. Soon, given the pace of development in America, there likely will be no more Glendales or Slaughter Pen Farms to rescue.

“We are trying to get as much as we can done,” Lighthizer says, “knowing we are not going to get most of it done.” It’s a glorious cause, he worries, that may be doomed to come up short.

John A. Farrell is the author of a biography of the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill and a forthcoming biography of Clarence Darrow. He lives in Montgomery County and can be reached at jaloysius1@gmail.com.

I may not approve of everything Lightizer does–I am aware of at least one instance where his ego cost the last opportunity to preserve a critical parcel of land–but his heart is in the right place and his record of accomplishment pretty much speaks for itself.

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Hat tip to old friend Nick Picerno for passing along this wonderful news.

From a press release issued today by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation (of which Nick is a board member):

More Battlefield Land to Be Protected at Third Winchester
SVBF, CWPT, Commonwealth of Virginia Team up to Protect Key Parcel

WINCHESTER, Va.—Nestled just north of the bustling Va. Route 7 corridor on the east side of Winchester lie now-quiet farm fields that the National Park Service has described as “some of the most sanguinary fields of the Civil War.” Here, during the Third Battle of Winchester (19 September 1864), on battleground now dubbed the Middle Field, the fighting was close and fierce and the Union’s 19th Corps suffered devastating losses. Forty percent of its men and every one of its regimental commanders was either killed or wounded.

Today, the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation (SVBF) and the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) joined with the Commonwealth of Virginia to announce that a contract had been signed with the heirs of C.E. Huntsberry to purchase 209 acres of battleground where the 19th Corps and thousands of other Americans on both sides battled one another for control of the northern Valley. SVBF Chairman Irvin Hess signed the contract with the Huntsberry estate last Monday.

Preservation Made Possible Through Partnership

The $3.35 million purchase price will be funded through a partnership between the Battlefields Foundation, the Civil War Preservation Trust, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and private partners.

In late 2005, the Foundation was awarded a $1 million state grant for the project by the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation, a state agency funded by the General Assembly to protect important natural and historic landscapes throughout the Commonwealth.

This fall, the Civil War Preservation Trust agreed to match the state grant with $1.61 million in federal grants and private donations. The Battlefields Foundation has spent $50,000 from its Carrington Williams Preservation Fund toward the final purchase of the property, expected by May 2009. Finalizing the sale is contingent on the Foundation’s ability to raise the remaining $690,000 of the purchase price—the organization has begun a campaign to raise the funds needed to complete the sale and permanently protect the property.

Hess commended the Foundation’s partners for their investment in the project. “This parcel has been a top-priority preservation project since the Battlefields Foundation’s inception,” he said. “But it is only through the efforts of our partners that we have made it this far. We are enormously grateful to the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation and the Civil War Preservation Trust for their tremendous contributions to the protection of this important battlefield landscape.”

“We now turn to the local community and to Americans everywhere,” Hess continued. “Permanent protection of this hallowed ground will only happen if people in the Shenandoah Valley and beyond step up to the plate and contribute to this cause. We ask you to honor the brave men who fought and lost their lives here, who speak across the generations to us, asking us not to forget what they did here.”

Connecting Already Preserved Battlefield Areas

The property lies in Frederick County at the heart of the Third Winchester battlefield and links areas previously protected by the Battlefields Foundation and CWPT. Stretching from Interstate 81 at its western end to Millbrook High School to the east, the preserved land will create a 575-acre battlefield preserve that retains much of its historic character—Americans who fought one another on this land almost 150 years ago would recognize its features today. To generate public appreciation of the battle, CWPT in 2007 opened a five-mile walking and biking trail on its 222-acre property. After completing the purchase of the new property, the Battlefields Foundation and the Trust will work together to create a seamless network of interpretive trails throughout this portion of the battlefield. Bordered by growing neighborhoods, the area promises to be an island of quiet green space for generations to come.

”The Civil War Preservation Trust is proud to partner with the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation to secure this key acquisition,” remarked Trust President James Lighthizer, noting that the Huntsberry Tract is the largest remaining undisturbed portion of the Third Winchester battlefield. “We have always been keenly aware the battlefield puzzle here was far from complete. Adding the Huntsberry property to already protected land at Third Winchester transforms this historic shrine into a genuine destination for heritage travelers.”

Lighthizer also reiterated Hess’s call for private donations to make the promise of preserving the Huntsberry tract a reality. “This is not a done deal by a long shot,” stated Lighthizer. “We need all Americans with a passion for history and preservation to rise to the challenge and give generously to this worthwhile effort.”

Battlefield Preservation an Ongoing and Timely Effort in Virginia

Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine emphasized the importance of battlefield preservation to the Commonwealth. “Virginia’s Civil War battlefields are significant threads in our country’s historic fabric. Through the VLCF and the efforts of the Department of Historic Resources, we are preserving Virginia’s important landscapes so that they can continue to educate future generations.”

Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, Director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, agreed. “Time is not on our side in this effort and waiting is not an option,” she said. “If future generations are to learn from these incredible landscapes – places where past generations gave the ultimate sacrifice – we must act now.”

The core area at Third Winchester covers almost eight square miles, totaling almost 5,000 acres, only 620 of which have been protected so far (not including the Huntsberry property). In the Shenandoah Valley, more than 16,000 acres of core battlefield land are still vulnerable and throughout Virginia and the nation, the numbers are even more dramatic.

Preservation Fulfills Wish of the Property’s Landowner

The Huntsberry family has owned the property since the early settlement of the Shenandoah Valley by Europeans. Originally granted to Huntsberry ancestor Jacob Huntsbarger by Lord Fairfax in 1762, the land has played a significant role in the agricultural history of Frederick County. In addition, the Huntsberry house itself, the remains of which still exist today, is noted on Civil War-era maps of the battlefield.

“I remember summers here when I was a boy,” said Bob Huntsberry, the great-grandson of the late C.E. Huntsberry and co-manager of his estate. “My grandmother kept us busy—we fed the pigs and collected the eggs and collected dandelions and had a lot of fun. This is an important place for my family—and growing up, we knew that it was historically important, too. We felt pretty strongly that it needed to be preserved so we are very happy that it will end up in good hands and that people will someday be able to come and learn about what happened here.”

Third Battle of Winchester

The property is in the core area of the Third Winchester (Opequon) battlefield where more than 54,000 Americans fought one another in the opening salvo of Union Gen. Philip Sheridan’s devastating Shenandoah Campaign – a military operation that ultimately decimated the Valley’s agricultural bounty in weeks of burning and destruction stretching as far south as Staunton.

In the early morning hours of September 19, 1864, Sheridan’s troops marched west from encampments around Berryville, ultimately stacking up in the Berryville Canyon along the modern-day alignment of eastbound Va. Route 7. The traffic jam created by slow-moving supply wagons delayed the deployment of the Federal army east of Winchester and foiled Sheridan’s plan to surprise and wrest the city from Gen. Jubal Early’s Confederates.

As Early moved troops south from Stephenson’s Depot to meet the Union attack, Sheridan sent portions of his army north of the Berryville Pike (Va. Route 7) to confront the southerners’ movement. The ensuing fighting at First Woods, Middle Field, and Second Woods along Redbud Run – including the Huntsberry property – was fierce, close, and devastating. Nearly 1,500 men were killed or wounded in this area of the battlefield alone and one soldier remembered the area as “that basin of Hell.”

In the 1992 National Park Service Study of Civil War Sites in the Shenandoah Valley, historian David W. Lowe wrote, “Third Winchester was the largest and most desperately contested battle of the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley, resulting in more than 9,000 casualties. The Union 19th Corps sustained 40 percent casualties (2,074 men) and lost every regimental commander during its assaults on the Middle Field and Second Woods…The Middle Field ranks with some of the most sanguinary fields of the Civil War, witnessing more than 3,000 casualties.”

In addition, it was by traversing these fields that two men who would serve their country in this battle would, through destiny, continue to serve the nation as President of the United States: Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley.

Protection of Natural Areas and Archeological Resources

The property contains almost a half-mile of Redbud Run, a major tributary of Opequon Creek, which drains into the Potomac River. Preservation of this area protects the stream’s sloped and forested buffer, which will enhance water quality for the stream itself as well as the downstream watersheds, including the Chesapeake Bay.

Once the purchase is finalized, portions of the property will remain in agricultural use while the Battlefields Foundation conducts archeological and cultural resources studies to learn more about the history that the land holds. This research will aid the Foundation as it works with its partners to determine appropriate types and locations of future interpretive activities.

This is fabulous news, and real accomplishment for all involved. It’s a very important parcel for the interpretation and preservation of the Third Winchester battlefield, and I am just tickled that it’s going to be forever preserved in its largely pristine condition. This now means that a major portion of the Third Winchester battlefield is forever preserved, and that these portions of the battlefield will be readily accessible to the public. Kudos to all concerned for a job very well done.

Please find a few dollars to contribute toward this very worthy cause.

The contrast of this wonderful preservation news against the horrific abandonment of their historic duty by the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation is just shocking to me…..

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From yesterday’s issue of The Gettysburg Times:

Park Service holds off on Cyclorama demolition pending court decision

BY SCOT ANDREW PITZER
Times Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, November 5, 2008 7:00 AM EST

A compromise has been reached in the planned razing of the former Cyclorama building at Gettysburg National Military Park.

The park has decided that “no demolition of the building will take place,” pending the resolution of a two-year-old lawsuit to save the building.

“During this time, the National Park Service will solicit bids for demolition of the Cyclorama building and the former visitor center, and plans to undertake the demolition of the former visitor center,” U.S. Dept. of Justice attorney Samantha Klein wrote in a Nov. 3 letter to U.S. District Court. “However, the National Park Service will inform all potential bidders…that no demolition of the Cyclorama Building take place prior to the district court’s ruling on the parties’ cross motions for summary judgment.”

A Virginia based agency, The Recent Past Preservation Network, and the son of the architect who designed the building — Dion Neutra — filed a suit to save the structure.

The park, meanwhile, intends to tear it down and restore that portion of the Gettysburg Battlefield to its 1863 appearance.

In a court hearing last week in Washington, D.C., a federal judge ordered the park to notify the court whether it planned to proceed with plans to demolish the building. Park officials had announced that they wanted to solicit bids this month, and begin demolition shortly thereafter. U.S. District Court Judge Alan Kay said that a decision on the lawsuit probably won’t be made until December.

Kay heard motions for a summary judgment, a legal term meaning that a judge rules on a case without it going to a full trial.

He plans to file a recommendation with acting Judge Thomas F. Hogan, but doubted that paperwork would be filed until mid-December.

The old Cyclorama building is located atop Ziegler’s Grove with the former park visitor center, built atop land that was home to fierce fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Previously, the cylindrical building had housed a famous painting of Pickett’s Charge, but the artwork was moved to a new $103 million visitor center located about one mile away.

Both the former visitor center and the old Cyclorama closed in April when the new visitor center opened.

The Recent Past Preservation group believes that the building can be relocated to another property in Gettysburg, and that it could be used as a museum or theater. Preliminary conversations have been held between the group and Gettysburg area businessmen Eric Uberman and Bob Monahan Jr., about potential new sites for the building.

“The Park Service never looked at an alternative to demolition in how to remove the building,” said Recent Past Preservation attorney Nicholas Yost.

Government officials said that the building is outdated, that it has undergone 30 repairs since the 1960s, and that the goal is to recreate that area of the battlefield to its Civil War appearance.

According to historians, 900 soldiers fought there during Pickett’s Charge, in what is dubbed The High Water Mark of the Confederacy.

Also, the park has questioned the validity of the lawsuit, filed in December 2006.

The six-year statute of limitations began in 1999, the park said, when it adopted its General Management Plan, and expired in 2005.

Let’s begin with the initial proposition that this thing never, ever should have been built where it is. With that as the underlying assumption, there’s the fact that the thing is just plain butt ugly. The building leaks like a sieve. I’m something of a student of architecture, and I appreciate modern architecture. However, what I don’t get–and never will–is why anybody other than Richard Neutra’s kid thinks that this hideous monstrosity should be saved, let alone be moved at astronomic expense footed by taxpayers. Does that mean that we’re going to start saving historic Waffle Houses now?

Tear it down. And don’t waste another dime of taxpayer money on this nonsense.

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A great opportunity to preserve an entire Civil War camp site, for very little money, has surfaced in Stafford County, Virginia, near Fredericksburg. From the October 11, 2008 issue of the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star:

Stafford considers Civil War park ACCOKEEK SITE RICH IN HISTORY

Stafford supervisors express interest in preservation group’s proposal to fund, create Civil War park

By CLINT SCHEMMER

A new idea has sprung up on how to save–and eventually open to the public–Stafford County’s best surviving cluster of Civil War sites.

The Board of Supervisors may partner with a preservation group, Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites, to accomplish those ends.

FSCWS wants to create a park to interpret and protect sites near Accokeek Creek where the Union army regrouped after the setbacks of 1862-63. The 25-acre tract is part of the 760-acre landfill administered by the Rappahannock Regional Solid Waste Management Board.

Within three years, FSCWS would raise the money to build a one-lane, one-way road linking the tract’s earthworks, regimental campsites, an 1863 log road and other historic features.

The forts, camps and road were part of what FSCWS has called the “Valley Forge of the Civil War.” Stafford’s camps–only a few of which survive–are where Union troops recovered from failures at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and early 1863’s “Mud March,” gaining the strength to prevail at Gettysburg.

Supervisor Harry E. Crisp II introduced the plan, which he and his colleagues voted 7-0 Tuesday night to send to the county Historical Commission. Supervisors requested a report within 30 days.

In another unanimous vote, supervisors asked the Planning Commission to amend the county land-use plan to include the historic tract as a public park.

Beforehand, the board heard an impassioned plea to act from Stafford historian D.P. Newton, founder of the White Oak Museum and an FSCWS director.

“This is the best, if not the last, remaining piece of ground that can present the history of the Civil War to residents of Stafford and visitors to the area,” Newton said.

“I ask you to honor these men and have a place where the old, the young, the disabled–everyone–can go and see what they constructed, that still exists. These soldiers’ footprint upon Stafford County, let that be their memorial.”

He noted that in 1940, the U.S. government proposed preserving the largest concentration of regimental camps in eastern Stafford. It dropped the plan when America went to war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today, those sites are gone, buried under a sea of subdivisions, Newton said.

“If you’re going to build a park, this is the only place you’ve got left,” he said of the Accokeek Creek tract.

In addition to financing the park’s access road, FSCWS has agreed to build trails, create a picnic area and install historical markers.

To get started, FSCWS needs about $10,000 in seed money for engineering work to design the road and estimate construction costs.

But even that small expense is a concern at a time when Stafford is cutting its budget and considering layoffs, Supervisor Mark Dudenhefer said.

FSCWS hopes to open the park by 2011, the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, which is expected to foster fresh interest in the conflict and more tourism at historic sites.

Since 2005, FSCWS has worked with the county and builders to preserve Stafford’s remaining camps and earthworks, post roadside markers and erect a granite monument to the soldiers who manned one redoubt that was recently bulldozed for a housing development.

Clint Schemmer: 540/368-5029
Email: cschemmer@freelancestar.com

According to the same article, the following will be preserved:

The proposed park tract in central Stafford features 12 historic sites. Its forts were built to defend against a feared attack by Confederate cavalry.

A network of such earthworks protected the Union encampments in Stafford, home to at least 120,000 troops, and the army’s bustling supply depot at Aquia Landing on the Potomac River.

The tract encompasses:

FORT 1: This two-faced, 248-foot-long Union army battery has two gun platforms that may have held 3-inch ordnance rifles or 12-pound Napoleon cannons. At its center is a square, 9-foot-deep supply pit or blockhouse. The fort area includes a zigzag trench and rifle pits.

FORT 2: This three-faced, 210-foot-long battery had four or five cannons.

FORT 3: This three-faced battery, which may have held six guns, included a heavily built blockhouse with below-ground storage for powder and shells.

FORT 4: Originally about 200 feet long, this earthwork has been damaged by logging.

WINTER CAMPS: A picket post and two dug-in winter camps, which had log shelters with fireplaces for the soldiers, are near the forts. One camp has what is believed to have been an officers’ quarters made of sandstone.

CORDUROY ROAD: The area’s wartime road network included a pine-log road, built so the Army of the Potomac could move wagons and heavy guns through boggy areas.

BRIDGE REMAINS: Sandstone abutments survive from a bridge that crossed a creek for an 18th-century road that was a major route for the Union army’s 11th Corps.

QUARRIES: Two late 18th-century sandstone quarries, one of which appears to have later become a mill, speak to Stafford’s role as a provider of building stone. Cut stone was put on skids and pulled by oxen or horses, or loaded onto shallow scows and taken downstream on Accokeek Creek.

–from Dovetail Cultural Resource Group and the Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites

What a treasure! To see an actual corduroyed road still in existence? Wow….

$10,000 is nothing to save such a site and begin the process of getting it ready for public access. Surely someone will step forward and donate the necessary money to do so….

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