THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 30, 1994 TAG: 9409300482
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
If Disney is looking for a locality that would welcome its 3,000-acre theme park, let it come to Hampton Roads.
To reap 29,000 jobs created by Disney's America, Norfolk would clear a quarter of any part of the city overnight, save the naval base.
And such is the competitiveness of these sisters by the sea, Virginia Beach would try to hijack the project, just as it tried to snatch away the Norfolk Tides.
Suffolk, the largest city with the smallest population in the United States, would make an offer Disney couldn't refuse.
Portsmouth, which already is considering running a canal down High Street, would turn over Olde Towne to Mickey Mouse.
Chesapeake, another largely uninhabited metropolis, would fill in the Dismal Swamp.
These cities share one advantage. Not one Civil War battle was fought here. The major engagement took place between two ironclad ships in the waters of Hampton Roads.
If Disney is interested in a theme park on top of the water where the Monitor and the Merrimac slugged it out, Norfolk, Newport News and Hampton would gladly floor over the roadstead.
Anywhere else in Virginia, any place you put your foot is on a battlefield. Hallowed ground, they say.
And no wonder. Two-thirds of the Civil War's battles took place in the Old Dominion. If Virginia hadn't been available, they would have had to call off the war.
But Disney still yearns for a site in Northern Virginia near the multitude of tourists that throngs the nation's capital.
In a statewide radio hookup Thursday with Gov. George F. Allen, a caller invited Disney to set up stakes in Fredericksburg.
Allen was understandably wary.
Fredericksburg is within earshot of the Battle of the Wilderness where Stonewall Jackson marched his army undetected across the front of a superior Union force and then fell on it from the rear.
If the Confederates hadn't run out of breath and ammunition chasing the Yankees, the war would have ended right there.
Spotsylvania and Stafford counties would be happy to host the theme park, the governor observed, if a proper site can be found.
But don't mention the Wilderness. The fight that erupted when Disney sought to stage its show near the Manassas battlefield 35 miles from Washington would be a tea party compared with the uprising of historians that would defend the Wilderness.
Allen is annoyed that outsiders intervened in local and state control of land in the commonwealth.
But that isn't surprising.
Many of their ancestors came through Virginia or gave their lives here during the nation's wars. They regard Virginia as the old home place, the nation's birthplace.
Which is a reputation to be cherished by those who happen to be here now.
Is there any other state that arouses such fierce affection? by CNB