The National Park Service sign near the site of the Battle of Hunterstown details the cavalry engagement there. The Park Service has designated the battle at Hunterstown and another at Fairfield as part of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The National Park Service announced Tuesday it intends to include Hunterstown and Fairfield in an updated field study of the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Both towns were the site of cavalry battles during the Battle of Gettysburg – Hunterstown on July 2nd and Fairfield on July 3rd.

But their inclusion in the field study by the Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program does not mean they are now part of the official Gettysburg National Military Park.

“In this program, the community drives the efforts. It’s not a top down thing,” said Katie Lawhon, the spokeswoman for the park. “This does not mean the National Park Service intends to expand the park boundary to include Fairfield and Hunterstown.”

In a news release from the American Battlefield Protection Program, it said the two sites “were the scenes of fierce cavalry fighting and were directly related to the battle.”

The release states the primary purpose of the update is to help planning the preservation of Civil War battlefields, but also makes clear that the program does not have the authority to expand park boundaries.

And that means the new inclusion of the battlefield won’t affect currently planned and approved development like the 2,000-home Gettysburg Commons, Lawhon said. Some of the houses will actually be placed on the Hunterstown battlefield, an outcome preservationists would like to avoid.

Lawhon said the National Park Service would need an act of Congress and funding before acquiring any new land or expanding the boundaries of the park.

But local preservationists hope an act of Congress will follow, now that a federal government study has legitimized claims the battles were integral in the battle.

“With the support there is in Congress to preserve these battlefield sites, it’s going to happen,” said Hunterstown preservationist Roger Harding. “I think a lot of people just don’t want to believe it.”

Instead of just taking land, the program provides funding to help communities implement planning policies to protect the battleground if they decide to, she said.

And that funding and designation as part of the Gettysburg Battlefield will open doors to more grant money and matching funds, Harding said.

He’s the leader of Friends of Hunterstown, a group that hopes to preserve Hunterstown’s history.

Hunterstown, four miles north of Gettysburg, has been called the “north cavalry field,” following the pattern of the east and south cavalry fields. Some historians have argued the seemingly separate cavalry actions from Hanover to Fairfield are unified elements, part of the big picture of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Groundbreaking on the first phase of Gettysburg Commons, near Routes 15 and 394, is anticipated for later this year, but it will be at least four or five years before the Hunterstown battle area is developed, developer Rick Klein has said.

Klein has already agreed to extra screening in certain critical areas and to install a wayside exhibit at the Confederate position near the Gilbert farm, but preservationists hope for further concessions.

They also hope the Civil War Preservation Trust will follow the lead of the American Battlefield Protection Program and consider Fairfield and Hunterstown as part of Gettysburg, a top priority for the trust’s preservation efforts.

Historic School House Ridge Battlefield at Harpers Ferry Violated This Past Weekend

Harpers Ferry, W.Va. – The Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) and the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) issued a statement today in response to the illegal bulldozing of a portion of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park this past weekend by a handful of local developers. Purposely and without permission, the developers dug a deep trench through historic land owned by the National Park Service and the American people.

“Beginning on the morning of August 19, 2006, a group of local developers moved heavy machinery and work crews onto the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and proceeded to lay water and sewer pipes on historic land where Stonewall Jackson launched one of the most brilliant tactical triumphs of the Civil War,” said CWPT President James Lighthizer. “The developers had neither authority nor the permits necessary to do this.”

The purpose of the water and sewer line is to facilitate a planned development of approximately 3,400 houses proposed for construction both inside and adjacent to the Park Service boundary. To date, the developers have not received any local approvals necessary for this development to proceed.

“These developers knowingly and defiantly ignored federal laws regarding construction on public land,” said Joy Oakes, Senior NPCA Mid-Atlantic Regional Director. “Americans have a right to expect that land protected by the Park Service cannot be bulldozed outside of an orderly and legal review. We encourage federal and state law enforcement officials to pursue these violators to the fullest extent of the law.”

For several years, CWPT and NPCA have been leaders in an extraordinary and successful effort to protect historic lands at Harpers Ferry. With the support of local business owners, civil rights leaders, conservationists, history buffs, recreation enthusiasts, heritage tourism interests, and elected officials, Congress expanded the park’s boundary in 2004. Millions in federal grants as well as private funds have been raised to purchase land from willing sellers to add to the national park.

“We are horrified at this premeditated and unprecedented desecration of School House Ridge,” said Lighthizer. “For several years, CWPT and NPCA have been working with federal and state officials to protect this property. Last year CWPT appealed to our members to help raise the $1.5 million needed to acquire the site bulldozed this weekend for preservation. We are outraged, and expect immediate restitution from these developers.”

As the developers were running their bulldozers last weekend, hundreds gathered from across the country to participate in a National Park Service-hosted commemoration of the centennial of a meeting at Harpers Ferry in 1906 that laid the cornerstone of the modern-day civil rights movement.

CWPT is a 75,000-member nonprofit battlefield preservation organization. Its mission is to preserve our nation’s endangered Civil War sites and promote appreciation of these hallowed grounds. Over the years, CWPT has saved more than 23,000 acres of hallowed ground, including 325 acres on the Harpers Ferry Battlefield.

By Megan Rowe / Daily Progress staff writer
June 26, 2006

TREVILIANS – To Steward Hottinger, the offer from Community Wireless Structures III LLC sounded promising.

The company was going to pay him an increasing sum during the next 35 years to build a 199-foot-tall cell phone tower on a stretch of his property off Louisa Road.

The first year, he and his wife, Mary, would have gotten $14,400. Eventually, the amount would have been about $33,311. The 75-year-olds hoped the money would help their three children and six grandchildren.

But the tower never became a reality for the Hottingers. Turns out the property that looked so promising to Community Wireless was also home to a bloody Civil War battle.

Roughly 1,700 soldiers died in the Battle of Trevilian Station, which was fought on the property now owned by Hottinger. Although the property is already home to two electrical poles, Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation members were concerned that the higher cell phone tower would be more noticeable. Hottinger’s property is located near the battlefield foundation’s property, but “nothing on that side of the road is owned by them,” he said.

Members of the battlefield foundation did not want to comment.

The proposal “went to a neighborhood meeting,” Louisa County Director of Community Development Darren Coffey said. “It got lambasted in the neighborhood meeting, and it got withdrawn before it ever made it to the development review committee.”

The development review committee is a Planning Commission subcommittee that makes recommendations before the proposal goes before the Planning Commission, Coffey explained. Then applications go before the county’s Board of Supervisors.

Tam Murray, a managing member of Community Wireless, said the company is instead pursuing a site on Poindexter Road and is discussing coverage with Cingular and T-Mobile.

“We want to develop a site in that vicinity that provides coverage to the carriers,” he said. “It just seemed to make sense to pursue a different site, given the controversial nature of that location.”

But Dovetail Cultural Resource Group LLC disagreed with the battlefield foundation’s concerns. The group did a cultural resource survey and noted that “the tower will be difficult to see from the critical points of the battlefield.”

Such concerns aren’t uncommon, though. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources must evaluate all potential cell phone towers and forward a recommendation to the Federal Communications Commission, said Ethel Eaton, who manages DHR’s office of review and compliance.

The DHR decides if the tower will affect historic property and if so, whether it will have an adverse effect.

“It’s a decision of the federal agency whether they want to go forward with the adverse effect or not,” Eaton added. “Obviously, we would protest a little if they decided to tear down Monticello to build a tower, but we only have three choices to give.”

While the county currently doesn’t require a DHR recommendation before applications go to the development review committee, “I think as the zoning administrator, I’m going to start requiring it,” Coffey said. “I think from the county’s standpoint, we want them to have all their ducks in a row before they submit it.”

Parts of Trevilians are cell phone dead zones. But “sticking a 199-foot tower on historic property isn’t the way to do it,” Coffey added.

Steward Hottinger, however, is still upset that he will not get the additional income from the tower. “Anything historical seems to have more power than common sense.”

“We don’t get a pension,” added Hottinger, who used to do vehicle body work. “Our whole life has been here. … We’ve made a living. I’m not complaining about that. But this would’ve been a nice little income for us.”

By MARC CHARISSE

Evening Sun Editor

The big white barn stood as silent sentinel for more than 140 years.

But time had taken its toll. Only the foolishly brave would have followed in the footsteps of Gen. Custer’s troopers, out across the rotting timbers to the bales of hay still stacked near the second-story windows where the Michigan men waited to ambush the Rebel horsemen.

The massive Reliant Energy generating station looms in background, but it was still easy enough, in the middle of these pristine farm fields, to imagine it was July 2, 1863. Surrounded by open space and pastoral silence, it was easy to hear the boom of cannons and the rattle of carbines.

It was here that George Custer, a general for just three days, was nearly killed and showed his true colors as a commander. Here, in a particularly vicious clash along the Hunterstown Road, his Michigan cavalrymen helped decide the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg.

And then it was gone.

Without warning, the historic Felty barn was torn down this month, just a few weeks before a battlefield tour that last year drew about 300 people to this little-known crossroads.

“That just takes the wind out of you,” said National Park Service ranger-historian Troy Harman, who has been studying the battle and working with preservationists to save at least some portion of the field. “I feel like a prize fighter who’s been staggered.”

The Felty barn may seem a minor casualty in the battle for historic preservation. Within a decade, most of the Hunterstown battlefield will disappear under a 2,000-home development approved for the area.

But there is still hope some portion of the field can be saved, and the old barn was the centerpiece of the battle, a symbol of the rearguard action fought by preservationists to save Hunterstown before it is too late.

Saving the farm

Posted near the old barn is a sign that reads: “Dan and Leo Keller, Adams County Conservation District, Farmer of the Year 1994.”

But much of the farm, owned by J. Felty during the Civil War, will become part of developer Rick Klein’s Gettysburg Commons.

Leo Keller doesn’t want to comment on the demise of his historic barn. The building was already falling down, he says, and he just finished the job.

Preservationists say he could have gotten an easement, grants to shore up the falling structure.

But Keller says while lots of folks made noise about saving the barn, no one ever actually came by with an offer to fix it up for him.

The preservationists say they tried. The trouble, they say, is that too many longtime locals take their historic heritage for granted. It’s a battle waged across central Pennsylvania between the reality of local agricultural economics and dreams of a national shrine to America’s collective past. So it’s no surprise that much of their support comes from Civil War and historical groups across the country.

Jackie Volkhen, of Grand Rapids, Mich., heard about the barn’s demise in an e-mail from Roger and Laurie Harding, newcomers to Hunterstown who bought the historic Tate farm four years ago and have since started a local preservation group.

Volkhen and her husband, John, are re-enactors who come to Gettysburg at least a couple of time a year and hope someday to move there.

“I was just horrified,” she says. “How much history is in that barn that’s gone now.”

She pauses before adding, “I suppose when you live in a place, you grew up there, you think, ‘Ah, that’s not a big deal.”

It wasn’t until a few years ago that the Volkhens learned of the role their local Michigan heroes played at Hunterstown from a fellow re-enactor. These days, a Hunterstown visit on the anniversary of the battle is the highlight of their annual pilgrimages.

Volkhen says she gets goose bumps when she walks the battlefield. “I get a profound sadness, that someone might have died where I’m standing. It might have been one of our Michigan boys,” she says. “I’m sad that the story is so little known.”

If more people understood what happened at Hunterstown, she says, maybe the battlefield could be saved.

Earning his spurs

Like most battles, exactly what happened at Hunterstown is surrounded with controversy.

This much is certain: Twenty-three year old George Armstrong Custer led a seemingly suicidal charge of a few dozen men down the Hunterstown Road against an enemy who was behind cover and outnumbered him.

Hemmed in by the fences on either side of the road, the troopers could only charge four abreast, a perfect target for the Rebels lined up at the Gilbert farm on the ridge to the south.

Dressed, as one of his men said, like a “circus rider gone mad,” and flashing his saber made of Toledo steel. The Boy General had his horse shot from under him and narrowly escaped death or capture when one of his men hoisted him onto his own horse as the Union troopers scurried back to the Felty farm less than a mile away.

Some historians see at Hunterstown the reckless bravery that would eventually get Custer killed at the Little Big Horn.

But ranger-historian Harman sees the battle a little differently. It was here that Custer really earned his general’s spurs.

It was the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Union forces were worried about an attack on the right flank at Culp’s Hill. The cavalry had been ordered to scout the area north of the hill in search on Confederate troops.

Rebel cavalry commanded by Gen. Wade Hampton had been spotted at Hunterstown, moving south, and it was Custer’s job to find out what lay behind them.

Harman says Custer planned a careful trap.

He hid men in the barn and in the fields across the road. Behind the barn, out of sight of the Rebels, Union artillery unlimbered and got ready for the bloody work ahead.

Custer understood the impetuosity of cavalrymen; Harman says he knew if he attacked, the Rebel horsemen wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge and would chase him back down the Hunterstown Road into an ambush.

He was right.

Confederate private Wiley C. Howard remembered what happened next:

“Our command had a thrilling experience and while charging a body of cavalry down a lane leading by a barn, ran into an abuscade of men posted in the barn who dealt death and destruction upon us. Within five minutes some four or five officers were killed or wounded and about fifteen men were slain or wounded.”

Casualties were relatively light – 22 Union cavalrymen, five officers and an unknown number of enlisted men on the Confederate side killed, wounded or missing.

But Harman says the battle was important because it kept the attention of both sides focused on the northern end of the battlefield when the crucial struggle was to the south, at Little Round Top and the Peach Orchard.

The cavalry action further delayed and weakened Confederate attacks on Culp’s Hill. It also delayed the redeployment of Union cavalry to the south, leaving the Union left flank unprotected on July 2.

Harman likes to call Hunterstown, four miles north of Gettysburg, the “north cavalry field,” following the pattern of the east and south cavalry fields. He sees the seemingly separate cavalry actions from Hanover to Fairfield as unified elements, part of the big picture of the Battle of Gettysburg.

“In all of these actions, Union cavalry buffered key Union positions in four directions of the compass,” he wrote in a recent article. “Each site is equally essential to accurately portraying Gettysburg as the most famous battle for human freedom in American History.”

Eyeing opportunity

Gettysburg developer Rick Klein sees economic opportunity in the fields around Hunterstown – not just for himself but for Adams County schools and communities.

He sees opportunity for history, too.

Called Gettysburg Commons for now, the development will market itself to “active adults” without kids who will swell the tax base without crowding the schools.

And the development will be marketed with an eye on history. Streets will have Civil War names and the 25,000-30,000-foot clubhouse will house a display on the battle of Hunterstown.

“The area’s going to develop. You can’t just shut the doors and block the highways,” Klein says. “But this is very positive growth.”

Homes will be priced from the low 3’s, Klein says, and will offer working couples royal amenities like the clubhouse and outdoor ballroom. Groundbreaking on the first phase, near Routes 15 and 394, is anticipated for later this year, but it will be at least four or five years before the Hunterstown battle area is developed, he said.

Klein has already agreed to extra screening in certain critical areas and to install a wayside exhibit at the Confederate position near the Gilbert farm. Still, he would only give the state Historical and Museum Commission approved plan a “C or a D.” Klein says he’s hoping for an A in preserving the battlefield, which lies outside the National Park Boundary.

Harman – speaking for preservationists and not the National Park Service – says he hopes Klein will make three additional concessions critical to the integrity of the battlefield.

Preservationists hope development will stop short of the artillery positions on the Tate-Felty ridge. A couple of hundred feet away, at the road, they’d like to see a turnout and interpretive marker at the center of the Union line.

Finally, moving the buffer of trees from 50 to 150 feet away on the east side of the Hunterstown Road would preserve the frontage of the Michigan cavalrymen and save the central part of the battlefield.

Klein says he’s willing to consider the changes, if he and his engineers are convinced of their feasibility and importance.

He’s also willing to talk about a monument to Custer, for which the Michigan re-enactors are already raising funds.

“What they’re going to get at the end of the day,” he promises, “is going to better than they ever expected.”

Preservationist Harding says she is appreciative and hopeful, noting Klein’s company contacted the Hardings about a monument to Custer and the trooper who saved his life on the Hunterstown battlefield.