COLUMN ONE : The Battle to Save the Battlefields : Without swift action, many Civil War sites will be gone by 2001--swallowed by development. Economics, politics and patriotism clash as the faithful make a last stand to keep our heritage alive.
“Use your imagination,” Roy Frampton was saying, his hand sweeping across the empty battlefield. “Out of the woods straight ahead come 12,000 Southerners, line upon line, rank upon rank, regiment upon regiment, marching, marching, marching, 110 steps a minute, keeping the rhythm of the drum, flags waving, an overwhelming tide of men. You hear their yell and now they’re on the dead run, coming right at us.
“The Northerners are here, right where we’re standing. They’re firing volley upon volley. Whole rows of Southerners are falling, but Lee’s army is surging. It’s chaos. Bloody hand-to-hand combat. Men rolling on top of each other, picking up rocks and heaving them at one another . . .”
Frampton pauses, as though to seek calm amid the fury of battle. He is, in his mind’s eye, a survivor of Pickett’s Charge, surrounded by Civil War ghosts who are no longer strangers. He knows many of their names, knows intimate details of their lives. Frampton, 45, is one of 100 free-lance Gettysburg guides who escorted some of the 1.5 million visitors to the battlefield last year. But people like Frampton--whose love of history keeps the Civil War from fading from American consciousness--face a devastating challenge: Urban encroachment is swallowing up our battlefields faster than they can be saved.
“I’ve been tramping Civil War battlefields for 43 years,” said Jay Luvaas, a professor of military history at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., “and I can tell you they are disappearing fast.”
In Spring Hill, Tenn., a Saturn automobile plant occupies part of the ground where Union and Confederate forces clashed. Large poultry sheds dominate much of the battlefield view in Prairie Grove, Ark. Housing developments in Fredericksburg, Va., have eaten up the tangled forests where the two armies met in hand-to-hand combat during the Wilderness Campaign in 1864.
Seven hundred new homes will soon claim the last of three battlefields in Winchester, Va., a town that changed hands so many times during the war--72 by one count--that merchants kept two cash drawers, one for Confederate money, the other for Federal dollars.
The Hazen Monument--one of the oldest Civil War memorials--stands in the shadow of a cement factory at Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee. Five major roadways that feed into Interstate 75 to Atlanta divide the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Two of the four sites of major battles in Tennessee’s Chattanooga Valley have been lost entirely to urban expansion, and a large chunk of the Manassas battlefield in Virginia was spared from development as a shopping mall only after public protests prodded a reluctant Congress into buying the disputed 542 acres for $120 million in 1989.
“I don’t think the American public understands how threatened this part of our heritage is,” said Walter Powell, historic preservation officer for the borough of Gettysburg. “This next decade will be the turning point. What we consider important is that close to being destroyed. Even Gettysburg is not safe.”
Alarmed by the potential destruction of Manassas, Congress in 1991 established an advisory commission to make the first survey of battlefield sites in 60 years. Its conclusion: “The nation’s Civil War heritage is in grave danger.” One-third of the principal sites had already been lost or were barely hanging onto existence, the commission said; without swift action, two-thirds of the sites would be gone by 2001.
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The commission identified 384 principal battlefields in 25 states from the 10,500 sites where armed conflicts occurred during the war. Of the 384, it chose 50 that had a direct impact on the course of the war and recommended that they be targeted for initial preservation efforts; it also suggested that tax incentives be provided to encourage preservation of the 144 key battlefields under private ownership.
One of the problems that makes the preservationists’ task daunting, says Edwin Bearss, the National Park Service’s chief historian, is that by 1860, the nation’s transportation corridors--the roads, railroads, waterways--were in place and it was along these routes that the major Civil War battles were fought. Today’s transportation pattern follows that of the 19th Century and those old turnpikes are now four-lane thoroughfares linking rapidly growing urban areas.
So, unlike battlefields from the Indian Wars--the most popular of which are in the still-spacious West--and the Revolutionary War--which was characterized by small clashes in some now-out-of-the-way places--the Civil War was fought in a wide path along what has emerged as our interstate highway system.
The interstates--I-95 linking Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia; I-81 through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley; I-65, I-24 and I-75 from Louisville, Ky., to Nashville and Atlanta--have spawned massive development, sprawling suburbs and soaring real estate prices that threaten the economic feasibility of saving farmland, let alone historic sites that aren’t on the tax rolls.
“What does it say about us,” David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, asked a Senate subcommittee recently, “. . . if we destroy or . . . stand by while others destroy historical America--knock it down, pave it over, blot it out--in the name of so-called progress and corporate profits?”
McCullough is one of a pantheon of historians and writers who have formed Protect Historic America to fight a theme park about American history that the Walt Disney Co. wants to build four miles from Manassas. The park, said to be the largest private construction project ever in Virginia, has the support of Gov. George F. Allen.
Disney’s controversial proposal has focused new attention on the future of Civil War sites, transforming a local zoning flap into a national issue. Disney opponents say they fear that the theme park and the development it would bring would result in Manassas being boxed in by towering modern buildings and bisected by traffic-clogged commuter roads.
As with many of America’s other most important Civil War sites, the threat to Manassas is external, not internal. I-66 skirts the battlefield, carrying a stream of bumper-to-bumper northern Virginia commuters in and out of Washington. Two heavily traveled state roads traverse the national park, and a mile away a strip of fast-food chains and gas stations inches ever closer to Bull Run Creek, where 25,000 Americans were killed or wounded in the two battles fought at Manassas. To the south and west, county supervisors have zoned 77 million square feet for commercial development.
“There’s no doubt development is coming,” said Kenneth Apschnikat, the National Park Service’s Manassas superintendent. “Our basic concern is that the integrity of the view from within the park is maintained, that you don’t stand on this sacred ground looking out at office buildings. We’re not asking for the moon. All we’re saying to the developers is: ‘Keep your buildings low so they don’t infringe on the battlefield.’ ”
Efforts to save the nation’s battlefields are as old as the Civil War itself, dating back to 1863, when citizens began buying and preserving farmland on which the Gettysburg battle had been fought. In later years Civil War survivors were instrumental in persuading a Congress dominated by veterans to provide funds to turn Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg and Gettysburg into national military parks.
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“Generations that we know not, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream,” said U.S. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg in 1889. Chamberlain won the Medal of Honor for his heroics at Little Big Top, a key moment in the Gettysburg battle.
Although the parks have always been big attractions, it is only in the last decade that the Civil War has crossed the threshold from being a subject pursued by academics and a handful of aficionados to one of broad popular fascination.
By some estimates no fewer than 50,000 Civil War-related publications have been written in the past 25 years, and 38 million Americans watched the premiere of Ken Burns’ television documentary, “The Civil War,” in 1990. More than 100 citizens groups across the country are involved in efforts to save Civil War battlefields.
Next year a Civil War memorial coin will be minted, with its expected proceeds of $5 million to $21 million earmarked to purchase battlefield sites threatened by development. (One hundred parcels of land within the national Gettysburg battlefield are, for instance, still privately owned.)
“Why there’s so much interest in the Civil War these days is anybody’s guess,” said James McPherson, whose book, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” was a surprise bestseller in 1988 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. “Part of the explanation, I think, is that we’re seeing a kind of bounce-back from the disinterest in anything military during the Vietnam era. Since the ‘80s, there’s been a great growth in the interest in the Vietnam War and in our commitment to the vets, and the Civil War seems to be part of that revival.”
No one, of course, favors not saving the battlefields but, like the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest, the question in the heavily populated mid-Atlantic states is one of priorities and balances: How does a county preserve what is precious while at the same time encouraging sensible development that provides jobs and increased taxes?
‘I get very resentful on this because there’s no chance of being a moderate,” said Bill Chase, a Culpeper (Va.) County supervisor. “Either you want to save it all or you’re perceived as a pro-growth fanatic who wants to pave everything over.”
Chase is a farmer, West Point graduate and two-tour Vietnam War veteran who remembers sitting on his great-grandfather’s knee and hearing the old man tell of fighting at Gettysburg. But when he recently joined the majority of the Culpeper supervisors in a 5-2 vote that would permit the construction of a Formula One racetrack near Brandy Station, on the site of the largest cavalry battle of the Civil War, his best friend stopped speaking to him and he received accusatory letters from as far away as California.
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“I wish we could keep the county unchanged forever, but you can’t save everything and Brandy Station was not a particularly significant battle,” Chase said. “To me the whole thing boiled down to a property-rights issue. As long as an owner doesn’t destroy the health or the welfare of his neighbor, he ought to have the right to decide how his land will be used.”
The farmland around Brandy Station was zoned for development 30 years ago and county supervisors did not encounter any public outcry when a small airport was built on it in 1969, followed by an industrial park in the early 1980s. But a California developer started buying up the land in 1989 with the intent of building a residential and commercial community and, after he went into bankruptcy, a Maryland developer announced plans for the racetrack.
Preservationists howled and made a $5-million bid for the land. If the bankruptcy court rejects the bid as inadequate, construction of the track is expected to proceed.
After the Civil War, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee returned to Brandy Station. Looking out on the rolling farmlands, he said: “The country here looks very green and pretty not withstanding the ravages of war. What a beautiful world God in His loving kindness to His creatures has given us. What a shame that men endowed with the reason and knowledge of right should mar His gifts.”
Annie Snyder, 72, of Gainesville, Va., knows Lee’s words by heart and has spent the last 10 years fighting plans to develop Manassas and Brandy Station. Her generation, she recalled, never dreamed the battlefields one day would be threatened. “It was just farmland,” she said. “We thought it would be here forever.”
The wife of a retired airline pilot, Snyder was instrumental in putting together 110 groups to defeat the planned shopping mall on the Manassas battlefield. “I was thrilled when they came up with the term ‘citizen activist,’ ” she said, “because I used to be known as a pain in the ass.”
Had the mall been built, she said, the family’s nearby 180-acre farm could have been sold for $10 million. (Its appraised value is $735,000.)
“My husband is fond of reminding me now about that,” she said. “He’ll say: ‘Annie, we could have left an awful good inheritance for our children.’ And I’ll say: ‘Well, true, but I feel like we’re leaving an awfully good one for our grandchildren.’ ”