THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 25, 1995 TAG: 9505250483
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Joan of Arc was on the phone the other morning.
Hundreds of such public-spirited citizens bless this region in striving to preserve, amid progressive changes, its natural beauty.
She fears the recent switch of the name of Seashore State Park to First Landing forecasts a shift of focus from the park's natural beauty to its development as a historic attraction, a theme park, God forbid.
Nothing of that sort was in the mind of local residents who proposed the new name. State officials said that it betokened no change in purpose or policy for the park.
Yet something like it loomed in 1967 when the state Conservation Department unveiled plans for a ``view train'' on a 3.5-mile track in the park. It also aimed to add three observation towers and make room for a museum in a huge sand dune.
That madness was checked by an uprising of folk headed by the likes of Benjamin Burroughs and Elizabeth Sills. The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star fought it as well. Years later, the state parks director admitted it would have been a mistake.
Those who love Seashore have had to repel one proposed assault after another on its pristine wilderness. It is as John Smith found it and Pocahontas flitted through it.
We can never let down our guard, particularly in view of Gov. George F. Allen's cavalier attitude toward the environment.
In 1955, the state closed Seashore rather than admit whites and blacks to swim in Bay waters off the park.
Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond advised the state ``to get out of the public park business. . . ''
A regional developer echoed the sentiment. That, too, provoked an outcry of protests that ended the inane notion. (Almond, as governor, conceded he shouldn't have said it.)
In 1961 the state began to reopen the park over three seasons: first, trails; then camp sites; finally, cabins.
Not long afterward, the board-approved removal of dune land to replenish sand consumed by tides along Virginia Beach.
In another bureaucratic fit in 1970, the state leased to Virginia Beach acreage in which to build a school amid dunes at the park's north end.
The only school-age population there was rabbits, raccoons, and foxes. The people, led for a year by Sills, Joseph C. Davis, and Anne Ramsey, again said no. Garden clubs at the Beach had defeated a previous attempt.
When such threats arose, Burroughs, a big bear of a man on a gimpy leg, reared up and urged the people to defend what rightly belonged to them.
``It demands our eternal vigilance!'' he boomed.
Now as well as then. by CNB