PERSPECTIVE ON HERITAGE : Mickey’s Messing With History : Disney’s plans for a Virginia theme park would cheapen hallowed ground with malls, fast food and trinkets.

From the Manassas battlefield to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and from Harper’s Ferry to Jefferson’s Monticello, stretches a unique national treasure of American history. Throughout this region of rolling Virginia countryside, the nation has lovingly preserved dozens of the sites where American democracy was forged and later sorely tested during the Civil War.

With its pastures and vineyards, farmhouses and villages, orchards and trout streams, the gentle countryside would still be recognizable to George Washington, who surveyed it for Lord Fairfax, or Thomas Jefferson, who farmed, dreamed, wrote and invented here.

Now this entire area is threatened. It may be overrun, cheapened and trivialized by a huge commercial venture called Disney’s America--a plan by the Walt Disney Co. to build an amusement theme park that would feature Disney’s own version of our history.

Disney plans to build the theme park and a real-estate development on 3,000 acres in a quiet rural community nestled against the Bull Run Mountains, close by the Manassas battlefield. Located 30 miles west of Washington, the theme park would include nine history exhibits. Among these would be a re-created Indian village, a 1930s state fair, a working farm, a group of automated presidential mannequins making speeches and a Civil War exhibit in which a Disney spokesman said visitors will “feel what it was like to be a slave.”

The Disney Co. is currently lobbying Prince William County, the Virginia Legislature and the U.S. Congress to subsidize this project with several hundred-million dollars for highway construction, sewers and water and even tourist promotion.

Disney’s park would have an extraordinary impact on the metropolitan Washington region, increasing traffic congestion and air pollution in an area that is already beset with environmental problems. These local concerns are being weighed against the tantalizing and perhaps illusory hope of realizing an economic boom and increased tax revenue from the Disney development.

Almost totally ignored up to this point is the impact that this proposed entertainment and real-estate venture (2,500 homes and 2 million square feet of commercial and office space) will wreak on the wealth of the area’s real history and natural beauty, which are our shared national heritage.

That impact would be felt most explosively on the Manassas National Battlefield Park, scene of the Civil War’s epic battles of First and Second Manassas in 1861 and 1862 (also called the battles of Bull Run). It was there that Confederate Gen. Thomas J. Jackson earned his famous nickname when a fellow officer observed, “There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall.”

Several miles from the scenic overlook marking Stonewall Jackson’s resolute stand is the site where Disney expects 6.3 million annual visitors to pay $30 each to tour its own re-creations of the Civil War. Thousands of Disney-bound cars will traverse the two public roads that cross this preserved ground of the Civil War’s first major battle. If Disney comes, a National Park Service plan to close these roads to through traffic is likely to go by the boards.

Perhaps memory-impaired by the dollar signs of Disneymania, our public officials seem to have forgotten that just five years ago, Congress spent $100 million purchasing land to protect this same battlefield from a far smaller, less threatening shopping center development.

Without any assistance from the Magic Kingdom, 800,000 visitors now flock to this 4,500-acre national park each year, walk its battlefields and view informative audiovisual presentations and electric maps at the visitors’ center.

To appreciate the changes that would be wrought by Disney on the Virginia Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley, one only needs to imagine the miles and miles of development and commercial sprawl that will inevitably spring up along the still-tranquil routes that lead to the proposed theme park.

Approaching the land that would become Disney’s America from the north on scenic, rural U.S. Route 15, a traveler passes a litany of revered names and places: Harper’s Ferry, Leesburg, Waterford, Ball’s Bluff, White’s Ferry, Middleburg. Continuing south past the Disney site on Routes 15 and 29 quickly brings one past the battlefields of Kelly’s Ford, Brandy Station and Cedar Mountain, on the way to Jefferson’s Monticello and James Monroe’s Ash Lawn at Charlottesville. Branching southeast on Route 3, one is at the center of another national park that preserves the Civil War killing fields of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness and Spottsylvania Courthouse.

The miracle is that this magnificent region of historic and natural beauty in Virginia has managed so well to preserve its essential character for the enjoyment both of its own residents and the visitors who come here from around the nation and the world. The last thing this country needs is a Hollywood re-creation of history in an area where we still have the real thing.