Neighbors of Civil War Battlefield Say ‘Coincidences’ Point to Conspiracy

It began when Gov. William Donald Schaefer boasted that Antietam could be “the Inner Harbor of Western Maryland,” an allusion to Baltimore’s commercially redeveloped waterfront. The governor’s offhand remark led to a state study that produced a proposal for building a heritage theme park and conference center on the Civil War battlefield.

Then the nonprofit Arlington, Va.-based Conservation Fund bought three farms in the region and said it would give the land to the National Park Service.

The plot thickened this summer, when the parks agency hired a satellite-mapping contractor and surveyors’ stakes were placed on nearby farms in the dark of night and without notice.

Some suspicious neighbors of the battlefield say that these seemingly unrelated events add up to a conspiracy to turn this pristine countryside, 65 miles from Washington, into a major tourist attraction. In that scenario, government and private actions ostensibly taken to preserve the battlefield area are seen as intending just the opposite.

“I have a theory that lots of people are up to something big, and I’ve been spending the last six months trying to get to the bottom of it,” said Ann Corcoran, who lives on a 158-acre farm near the battlefield with her husband, Howard, a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency, and their two children.

The lack of hard evidence to support that theory has not deterred Corcoran and other suspicious neighbors who have organized, crowded county meetings and threatened to sue to stop what they see as efforts to allow “tasteful” development disguised as preservation.

Corcoran says her goal is to replace this “preservation for profit” with voluntary, private preservation measures that would also protect the farmers, who feel threatened both by development pressures and government actions.

Meetings here this summer with Park Service officials and the Washington County commissioners failed to allay the locals’ fears. For some of them, suspicion of a plot has turned into a firm belief.

“The magnitude of this is unbelievable!” said Becky Weaver, a leader of SHARP (Save Historic Antietam with Responsible Policies). “Really weird things are happening,” her husband, Russell, added. “A heritage theme is a developer’s dream.”

Richard J. Rambur, superintendent at Antietam National Battlefield Park, acknowledged that “there have been a number of things that would seem to be coincidences.”

The neighbors’ first mistake, Rambur said, was to take the governor’s remark literally when he was really only expressing a general thought that Mark Wasserman, his chief of staff, says “had very little, if anything, to do with rides and theme parks.” Wasserman added: “The governor aims to preserve Antietam.”

Later, the state-sponsored tourism report suggesting a heritage-theme park was “rejected out of hand” by a county advisory committee, Rambur said.

Rambur said he fears that with development pressures pushing out from Washington, it could be just a few years before the hills around Antietam are lost to housing tracts.

With that in mind, Rambur said, he met with representatives of the Conservation Fund, an offshoot of the Nature Conservancy, which buys up property without fanfare in order to save it.

“They did not want publicity, so they did everything quietly, which really stirred up anxiety,” Rambur said.

One of the farms had been sold for $77,000 and subdivided six months before the Conservation Fund acquired it for $184,000 late last year. The seller making the profit had been assigned by the federal government to work with the Conservation Fund so he could learn how to acquire “natural landmarks.”

“It’s very embarrassing,” said Conservation Fund spokesman Jack Lynn, but not, he indicated, sinister.

Lynn said the fund is no longer interested in acquiring land around Antietam, and has moved on to preserving other Civil War battle sites.

The dust had hardly settled when Congress expanded the area in which the battlefield park could acquire land, and the Park Service undertook the satellite mapping of the area as a first step toward revising its 1971 Antietam plan.

In executing its space-age survey, the mapping contractor placed stakes on private property at night without giving notice or seeking owners’ permission.

Then, Rambur said: “Immediately, people thought, ‘Here they go, they’re chalking off a new boundary at night.’ ” The survey method, not surprisingly, was a public-relations disaster.

There was also the county commissioners’ stalled attempt to enact a “pig ordinance” restricting livestock, which farmers viewed as an effort to destabilize the agricultural economy and make the area more attractive to tourists.

“This area has always been good, productive agricultural land,” said Donald Main, a cattle and feed farmer. “The (Civil) War destroyed it, and the wrong kind of action could do it again. Behind it all is the visitors, the tourists.”