Population pressures in the fast-growing Washington region are threatening historic Revolutionary and Civil War sites that, once destroyed, will be lost forever.
Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf, R-10th,recently introduced a bill to declare a 175-mile swath running through four states — from Charlottesville to Gettysburg — as the nation’s 28th National Heritage Area. The tract contains the homes of eight former presidents, including Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Oak Hill in Loudoun County, where James Monroe wrote the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the largest concentration of Civil War battlefields and rural historic districts to be found anywhere in the country.
It also includes former Indian trails, a slave chapel and Underground Railroad stops, Gen. George C. Marshall’s Leesburg mansion (which only escaped demolition in 1999 when 11 nations that benefited from his Marshall Plan sent donations to save it), and Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, where the first Middle Eastern peace accords were signed in 1978.
Wolf’s bill contains a modest $2 million for land acquisition and another half-million for managing the historic district. Considering what’s there, this is a bargain.
The proposed Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage District “has soaked up more of the blood, sweat and tears of American history than any other part of the country,” said Yale historian C. Vann Woodward. “It has bred more Founding Fathers, inspired more soaring hopes and ideals and witnessed more triumphs, failures, victories and lost causes than any other place in the country.”
But this hallowed ground is on the verge of becoming a lost cause itself. Last year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation put the area, most of it privately owned, on a short list of the country’s 11 most endangered historical venues. Wolf’s bill was modeled on the landmark legislation that created the successful Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District in 1996. While such a designation is voluntary and honorific, it helps historic preservationists at the local level in their fight against the clutter of strip malls and subdivisions.
While history’s lessons can be taught via books, videos or artifacts preserved behind museum glass, they are rarely felt as powerfully — or understood as deeply — as when you actually stand on the exact spot where world-altering events unfolded and experience the insistent tug of the past. The Journey Through Hallowed Ground effort attempts to preserve the rich historical patina that provides context and meaning to contemporary American life.
This public-private partnership process is also a kind of reverse Disneyfication. Instead of businesses luring tourists to artificial versions of the past, visitors come to see actual places with real historic significance and spend money at private establishments that enhance — not replace or desecrate — them. Public support for a national historic district there is high; 90 percent of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania voters in the zone already support the initiative.
As noted Pulitzer prize-winning author David McCullough so eloquently stated, “They are the real thing, and what shame we will bring on ourselves if we destroy them.”
