Battlefield Preservation – Saving Our Heritage

On the morning of May 5th, 1864 James Larue McCown stood anxiously off to the side of The Orange Plank Road with the rest of company K of the 5th Virginia of the old Stonewall Brigade. The warm spring sun was starting to burn off the chill of the night before. He nervously checked his cartridge box and canteen even though he had already checked it at least twenty times already. Captain George Washington Kurtz his commanding officer sensing his anxiety approached his new recruits and tells them,” In a short time you will be engaged in battle and as none of you have been under fire before, I want you to stand up like men and do your duty.”

General Walker rode up and ordered the skirmish lines forward. Shortly after noon they encountered Federal Infantry. This was the beginning of the Battle of The Wilderness and by sundown on May 6th over 29,000 Americans would lie either dead or wounded.

Now 145 years later not far from where my ancestor first “saw the elephant,”( first time in battle ) Wall Mart now has plans to build a 141,000 square foot super store.

I can only tell you for me battlefield preservation is personal.

For twenty years I have done authentic campaigner Civil War living history to honor my ancestors who fought for both armies and to raise people’s awareness of the need to save our precious heritage.

According to Rob Hodge, battlefield preservationist and certainly the most notable among those of us who try to portray this era as accurately as possible in our modern era, we lose one acre of battlefield land every hour of every day. He notes that businessmen and developers try to frame the discussion as a question of what is to be gained as opposed to what we might lose. They make appeals about not holding back progress and often call those who appeal to higher causes as naive, reactionary or elitist.

When all else fails they will claim that there is really no significance to the land they would like to develop. As one Robert K. Krick wrote in a 2008 letter, the fact that nothing happened on the land is not true. Mr. Krick wrote about a mining companies plan to mine limestone on land next to what is already preserved at Cedar Creek Battlefield, where what to the mining company was nothing significant turned out to be where the beginning of the climatic Union counter charge began that turned this battle into a rout.

Developers have had plans to build on the very ground that Jackson launched his flank attack on the Federal 11th Corps at the Battle of Chancellorsville. A casino group was going to build a casino very near Gettysburg. Disney planned a theme park and a shopping mall was zoned to be built over Lee’s Head Quarters at Second Manassas and an incinerator tower is being planned near the Worthington House on the Monocacy Battlefield prompting the Civil War Preservation Trust to name it to 2009′s 10 most endangered battlefields list.

Why should we save this land?

The Civil War preservation trust website replies far more eloquently than I could. ” These battlefields are part our national heritage, scenes of struggle and sacrifice where American soldiers lost their lives,” and I might add their boyhood and their innocence.

No period in our history colors who we are like the Civil War era. These fields represent not so much a catalog of casualty figures and who won and who lost. These fields are the physical manifestations of a clash of ideas and ideals and lessons as a nation that if we forget we are destined to repeat.

There is no price tag that should or could be placed on these fields of our collective memory. They belong to no one; they belong to all of us.

Tags: Battlefield, Heritage, Preservation, Saving