Battlefield vs. parking lots

[dusty27]

Preservation Trusts
Keeping the Battlefields From Becoming Parking Lots
By JOHN HANC http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/us/13civil.html
CROSSING the Rappahannock is considerably easier for Jim Campi than it was for Ambrose Burnside.
Burnside, the ill-fated Union Army commander in the winter of 1862, endured mud, cold, communications breakdowns and unreliable supply lines — not to mention hostile fire — during his attempt to ford this Northern Virginia river. Despite the cool drizzly weather of October 2006, Mr. Campi, the policy and communications director for the Civil War Preservation Trust, has no such problems. The Rappahannock’s muddy waters pass in the blink of an eye as his Honda Pilot purrs down I-95, cellphone and coffee mug at his side.
He’s headed for the same place as Burnside and his army of 110,000: 11/13/2006
New York Times (NY)
Mr. Campi and his organization have just won their own battle on the same hallowed ground. Working with an unlikely ally — Tricord, a developer — as well as with local preservation groups, the trust managed to buy the pristine 208-acre Slaughter Pen Farm. “It’s the largest private-sector battlefield transaction in U.S. history,” said the trust’s president, Jim Lighthizer, who met Mr. Campi at the entrance to the property, located between a row of warehouses and a small private airfield. It may be the largest, but it’s just the latest in a series of battlefield preservation victories for the trust, which is based in Washington and was created seven years ago from a merger of two other groups. “The trust’s success in fund-raising has just astonished me,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson, who is professor emeritus at Princeton. He credits “the creative ideas, energy and widespread contacts” of Mr. Lighthizer, a former Maryland state official, and the organization’s members, whom Mr. McPherson calls “true believers,” for the trust’s record of saving 23,000 acres of Civil War battlefield land in 18 states.

It is a remarkable record for a relatively small nonprofit group (there are only 27 paid staff members), one that begs comparison with the outmanned armies of Lee, who, under command of his ablest lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, had taken defensive positions in the high ground along the tree line, about a quarter-mile from where Mr. Campi and Mr. Lighthizer were standing. The fight that waged across this farm on Dec. 13, 1862, involved about 15,000 men and was a far closer contest than the one on the other, better-known part of the Fredericksburg battlefield, Marye’s Heights. There, Union assaults against Confederates positioned behind a stone wall were repulsed at terrible cost. At Slaughter Pen Farm, however, Pennsylvanians under Gen. George Meade got to the trees and almost routed the Confederates, who eventually regrouped and drove the men in blue from the field — helped by the inept Union general, William Franklin, who refused to commit troops from his reserves, which could have turned the tide of the battle. Five Medals of Honor were awarded for valor that day, and 9,000 casualties sustained in close fighting, leading to the Slaughter Pen nickname. The bravery on both sides also inspired one of the most famous quotes of the war: General Lee, scanning the battle from a distant hill, said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.” Walking the undulating ground of the Slaughter Pen battlefield, the ebb and flow of the fighting seems far more vivid. “I can write until I’m blue in the face,” said the historian Frank O’Reilly, author of “The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock.” “But no one’s really going to get it unless they walk the battlefield.” Because of the trust and its members, they can do just that. And not only here: the trust has helped turn the tide in battlefields large and small, often working with local groups, as is the case in Gettysburg, where the trust is helping to fight development of a casino near the battlefield. Slaughter Pen, which was a family-owned farm outside Fredericksburg, came up for sale last December and was described by the listing agent as “one of the best industrial sites in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The trust sprang into action, and using contributions from its 70,000 members, plus matching federal grants that Mr. Lighthizer was able to secure — including $2 million from the Department of the Interior — the group could buy the land for $12 million. (Much of the money had to be borrowed from Sun Trust Bank, a partner in the effort to save the battlefield; Mr. Lighthizer expects to pay the balance over the next four years through fund-raising.)
Crucial to the effort was a provocative solicitation letter that went out to trust members under Mr. Lighthizer’s signature. “You and I can save an irreplaceable piece of our nation’s past that, if we do not act, will soon be just another blot of ugly suburban sprawl,” it read, urging members to become “21st-century heroes” by helping the trust “to save the land where 19th-century heroes hallowed the ground forever.” Who are the “21st-century heroes” who belong to the trust? Three-quarters of them are male, average age 55, said David Duncan, the director of membership and development. Some are Civil War re-enactors, and some have ancestors who fought in the war, but many don’t, and about half live in states where there are no Civil War battlefields. What they share, Mr. Duncan said, is a belief that “the Civil War is the defining moment of American history, and that it’s crucial to preserve these places for future generations.” That’s just what the trust is doing, and it is specific about it in its appeals. “It’s not ‘help us cure a disease,’ it is ‘we are buying 208 acres in Fredericksburg and here’s a map,’ ” said Mr. Duncan, who wrote the Slaughter Pen letter. “Our members see we can do what we say we’re going to do.” The consequences of what can happen when they don’t, and what has happened to the thousands of acres of battlefield already lost before the trust existed, is evident barely four miles away, on the other part of the Fredericksburg battlefield. There, 8,000 of Burnside’s men were killed or wounded trying to breach the 700-foot-long stone wall that has been rebuilt for tourists and now runs perpendicular to a small parking lot and a National Park Service visitors’ center. Compared with the farm, it is a cramped, depressing piece of property. The ground the men charged over is now a suburban neighborhood that has crept up to a stone’s throw from the wall, closer than most of the Union soldiers got that day. There is another place nearby that Mr. Lighthizer and Mr. Campi like to show visitors as symbolic of the trust’s raison d’être. That night in 1862, after the guns quieted, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine — a Bowdoin College professor-turned-officer who would become a hero at Gettysburg the following summer — wrote movingly of hearing “cries for help, some begging for a drop of water, some calling on God for pity, and some on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun.” The spot where Chamberlain lay that night, trying to sleep amid the blue-coated bodies and despite “the chilling, many voiced moan that overspread the field,” is known by historians and many Fredericksburg residents, who visit there often. It’s the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.