Victory over the battlefield

By The Daily Progress

Published: July 2, 2008

One of the nation’s most threatened historic sites has just gained additional protection.

Another 189 acres of protected land has been added to the Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park near Middletown.

The total area of the battlefield is huge — 6,200 acres — but only 1,092 of those acres had been protected.

The newly acquired property is significant because it helps link two separated pieces of the park, one at about 700 acres and the other at about 300.

Not only is the land important in and of itself because of the military activity that occurred there, but it also is critical to preserving some sort of holistic sense of the battlefield. If visitors are ever to move seamlessly between the existing northern and southern pieces of the park, they will need to do through such linkages.

The property also is important ecologically, preservationists say. The land will stay in agricultural use while the new owners decide how best to present its share of history.

Belle Grove Plantation was built in 1797 and had been inhabited by descendants of the Civil War era until the mid-1950s. Now, a number of different groups collaborate on preserving and maintaining the house and battlefield.

Funding to acquire the latest piece of land came from federal and state sources, with the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation, working with the state to place the new parcel under conservation easement.

The battlefield had recently been declared by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be threatened, due to expansion of a quarry. Other industrial projects also have jeopardized the battlefield’s integrity.

This week’s preservation announcement does answer that particular threat — the preservation effort was initiated long before the National Trust announcement — but it is an encouraging development in the fate of Cedar Creek.

There remain 50,000 acres of unprotected Civil War sites in Virginia. Sixteen thousand of those lie nearby in the Shenandoah Valley.

Virginia cannot expect to shield all of that acreage, but it can and should target the most important and the most vulnerable. Cedar Creek was an important battle and a turning point in the war. The Confederate surprise attack is still studied today by military theorists, reports the SVBF. That attack initially won a victory for the South. But a Northern counterassault swept the Confederates from the field, a victory that helped persuade voters to re-elect Abraham Lincoln.

Seeing where these events took place, in context, with the ante-bellum stone house still presiding over the scene, puts life and understanding into history far more effectively than mere passive study could ever do.