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"Colonial Williamsburg" Willing To Let Civil War Battlefield Be Destroyed
March 4, 2004--When you hear the name "Williamsburg," what word comes first to your mind? Most likely it is "Colonial," and that's a problem facing people trying to preserve the site of the Civil War Battle of Williamsburg today. It was a big battle for a little Virginia town. Now the site where the fighting took place is rapidly being nibbled to death around the edges, with the destruction, ironically enough, being driven in large part by projects supporting or related to the Colonial Williamsburg commercial area.
The presence of Union and Confederate troops temporarily quintupled the population from 13,000 to 73,000 on May 5, 1862, the Hampton Roads Daily Press noted recently. The town has long since gone back to its former size, but growth in the form of everything from pancake houses to bus garages is starting to take its toll.
Less than a quarter of the original Williamsburg battlefield remains, local historians say. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which operates Williamsburg's Historic Area, mostly owns what's left. The area fought over covers much of the area between today's Wren Building to the north and the Yorktown line to the south.
Colonial Williamsburg officials express regrets about devouring the historic lands but claim they are not all that historic to begin with and have no plans to stop. A current project involves construction of a large garage for tour buses on the Civil War battlefield land.
"We certainly respect other areas of history," said company spokesman Jim Bradley, "but our prime focus is the colonial period just before the American Revolution, during it and just after."
Bradley said a Colonial Williamsburg company archaeological survey of the site off Pocahontas Trail where the bus garage is going in produced "absolutely nothing significant" from the Battle of Williamsburg.
Williamsburg resident Earl Hastings is unimpressed by Bradley's argument, and thinks it's a shame that what remains of the battlefield is not being preserved.
"There are a lot of first-hand accounts of this battle," said Hastings, who with his son wrote "A Pitiless Rain: The Battle of Williamsburg, 1862."
"Seeing this land makes you understand just how hard it was for those guys to fight here, enduring the long marches through heavy woods with the smoke from gunfire and the rain," Hastings said. "And they fought with great spirit and great patriotism, on both sides."
And just because the test excavation didn't turn up Civil War artifacts, doesn't mean the battle wasn't fought on that ground. Hastings believes it was, and so does Newport News historian and author John Quarstein, an expert on local Civil War history.
Quarstein called the presence of a shrinking Civil War battlefield part of the "tremendous resources" from that era that both the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Colonial National Historical Park have chosen not to interpret.
"All we need to do is properly save, then interpret them and they become an asset to the community. Tourists come, they see, they leave their money and they go," he said. "I don't see that as a problem."
There is interest in Williamsburg's major battle, Quarstein said. Descendants of the 70,000 who fought there are keenly aware of the site and call often to see about touring it and getting "in touch" with the place their ancestors clashed. Quarstein is happy to walk them around.
Although much is already gone, Quarstein said earthworks still tower as high as 30 feet above the battleground. Those, like the "Bloody Ravine" where the battle ended, are "protected" only by the woods and terrain that hold development at bay for now.
A list released this week of the nation's most endangered Civil War battlefields doesn't include Williamsburg. But the battlefield, the city's largest Civil War claim to fame, is one of many examples of Civil War battlefields being consumed by development.
The battle started off as a Southern success story. After nearly falling to the Confederates around midday, Union Gen. George McClellan's troops rallied with a push into the Confederate lines from the east and west. They took Williamsburg, but their effort failed because the Confederates achieved their goal of pulling back to defend Richmond.
While not considered one of the Civil War's major battles, the Battle of Williamsburg was the bloodiest to that point, an ultimate draw that both sides considered a victory. Had McClellan been able to defeat the Confederates there, many historians believe the Civil War would have ended. Instead, it stretched on for three more years.
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