NATION : U.S. Bids to Save Civil War Sites
The federal government will try to preserve more than two dozen Civil War battlefields, but does not have enough money to buy the historic sites, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. said today.
Lujan said he will ask state and local governments and private groups to join in an “American Battlefield Protection Plan” to make sure the fields where Union and Confederate soldiers clashed do not disappear beneath shopping malls or suburban industrial parks.
“Some of the battlefields . . . would be purchased, but some of them can be commemorated simply by easements, some of them (with) a plaque,” Lujan said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” program. “We don’t have enough money just to go off and buy all these sites.”
Lujan will seek $15 million in seed money.
The 25 sites to be protected are located in 14 states.
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