Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 7, 1993 TAG: 9303070129
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BRANDY STATION LENGTH: Long
BRANDY STATION A BATTLEFIELD FOR PRESERVATION
Gingerly unfolding a yellowing page of Harper's Weekly, B.B. Mitchell III explains the furious battle scene it depicts, and shows off a large print of the same martial carnage on his living room wall.Stirrup-to-stirrup, saber-to-saber, cavalrymen in Union blue and Confederate gray go at each other in the pictures: It's the Battle of Brandy Station, June 9, 1863.
If Mitchell had stood then where he stands now as he describes it, he'd have breathed the smoke of rebel Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's cannon fire. He might glimpse a young Union officer named George Armstrong Custer or, watching from a distant hill, Robert E. Lee himself. For 14 hours, 17,000 men on horseback and 3,000 on foot clashed all around.
"Right there," Mitchell says, gesturing out his window.
He and others worry that fading magazine sketches and artist's renderings may be the only reminders of the battle if a developer proceeds with plans to turn much of the acreage into a "planned community," a subdivision-industrial park complex called Elkwood Downs.
"Once you've destroyed the integrity of what happened here," Mitchell said, "for all practical purposes, except looking in a book, you cannot see where men died fighting for a belief."
Many Civil War battlefields have been saved, of course - among them, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Antietam and Manassas, where Congress reluctantly paid $200,000 an acre to stop a shopping mall in 1988.
But far more are like the paved-over sites of the Siege of Atlanta or, like Brandy Station, unnoticed.
Of 10,000 places where the war was fought, only about 435 are considered of special significance, said Grae Baxter, president of the Civil War Trust, a nonprofit preservation funding group. Of those 435 sites, she said, 85 percent remain in private hands, vulnerable to development.
"Development is moving out these same routes as the war," she said.
Today, a weathered roadside marker is one of few indications that lines of horsemen charged here; not one acre of the sweeping battlefield about 1 1/2 hours from the nation's capital has been officially set aside. And yet the rolling panorama remains mostly farmland, little changed since 1863.
"Brandy Station was the largest cavalry engagement ever fought in the Western Hemisphere," said Virginia Tech history professor and Civil War historian James Robertson Jr.
An early clash in Lee's audacious campaign toward Gettysburg a month later, the battle was the first time federal mounted troops proved themselves against the vaunted Confederate cavalry, scholars say.
The battle's scope, consequences and 1,441 casualties, Robertson said, "gave it a patriotic and sacred importance that transcends simple remembrance and economic greed."
The uncivil war that has broken out around Brandy Station pits the increasingly well-armed national preservation movement against the developer, local officials pushing industrial growth and property owners who fear the price of honoring history will be paid from their wallets.
Although the warring factions are making tentative moves toward a truce, their statements reflect a hard, underlying reality:
Large-scale historic preservation, especially saving the 350 most significant Civil War sites that remain unmarked, has become harder than ever, sometimes unaffordable.
Today's Battle of Brandy Station turns on two issues: How much of the fighting ground should remain untouched, and who pays?
The developer, Lee Sammis Associates Inc. of Irvine, Calif., insists it's being a good new neighbor.
It agreed to set aside 248 acres in its 1,475-acre corporate park, where 6.2 million square feet of warehouse-office-industrial space are to be built. On the remainder of Elkwood Downs' 3,800 acres, the company said it hopes to build up to 2,700 houses, a golf course and an equestrian area.
"We're not anti-history," said Michael Armm, who runs Sammis' local office from a building that was the home of Civil War Gen. A.P. Hill.
Armm noted self-imposed building height restrictions and extensive landscaping plans.
"We're not out here to pave the entire battlefield, as these letters say that they send out to get support," he said, referring to appeals for help that Mitchell's Brandy Station Foundation has circulated through Civil War societies and publications.
About six years ago, Sammis began quietly buying these farm fields, and claims to have invested about $25 million so far.
Local officials want more jobs in rural Culpeper County, where four people in 10 commute outside to work. So few were surprised when county commissioners approved Sammis' bid to rezone its 1,475 acres from agricultural to light-industrial zoning.
Mitchell and other preservationists are fighting the rezoning in court, but also opened battle on another front: They persuaded the state Department of Historic Resources to issue a Virginia Landmark designation for the battlefield in 1989. And in 1991 came a federal declaration: eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places.
As preservationists exulted, many local property owners, worried that their land within the designated 14,000-acre historic area could lose value, mobilized into a group called Citizens for Land Rights.
By the busload, said leader Sue Hansohn, "We went down to Richmond and we lobbied like hell." Legislators quickly ordered the state landmark designation reconsidered, and possibly scaled back or dropped.
The battle then moved to Washington, where in September the preservationists absorbed another defeat as National Register eligibility was rescinded.
The Brandy Station Foundation contends it was pulled back because some senators had threatened to block legislation authorizing the sale of commemorative coins that could raise millions of private dollars for battlefield preservation.
The National Park Service has identified four "engagement areas" at Brandy Station as most crucial in the battle that swept along at a gallop.
Not all of that acreage is Sammis', but one spot that is may best show why emotions run so high: It's the field where 108 out of 300 men were lost in a breakneck charge of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry against 16 Confederate cannons dug in around a country church.
If true courage means following duty to death, these troopers displayed it, said Clark B. Hall, who is writing a history of the battle.
"If there is a place where the word `hallowed' can be applied, it is that piece of ground," Hall said.
The battery site and some acreage near the church would be preserved by Sammis' historic easements. But the field itself, lying closest to a county airport, is in the heart of Elkwood Downs' proposed corporate park.
Signs in the stubbly field now read: "Industrial-Commercial Site Available."
"That piece of hallowed ground would be obliterated by this developer's plans," Hall said.
Preservationists want Sammis to move that part of his development into a neighboring woods. "We would pay him for it," but cannot afford his price, Hall said.
Sammis counters that the preservationists have a "no-growth agenda" encouraged by a local environmental group. In one rancorous meeting, he said, preservationists told him they wanted all of his land. "Of course, with no intention of paying anything for it," he said.
Sammis charged there was too cozy a relationship between the preservationists and Interior Department regulators, including the keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, Jerry Rogers.
Clearly, someone needed to step in the middle, and the Civil War Trust seems to be taking that role.
Baxter has been meeting with all sides and hopes to use trust money to buy battlefield land once a compromise is worked out.