A New Battle of the Wilderness

Is this really about a Civil War battlefield, or about local merchants who don't want competition from Wal-Mart?

Officials in central Virginia approved a Walmart Supercenter early Tuesday near one of the nation's most important Civil War battlefields, a proposal that had stirred opposition by preservationists and hundreds of historians.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to grant the special permit to the world's biggest retailer after a majority of more than 100 speakers said they favored bringing the Walmart to Locust Grove, within a

cannonball's shot from the Wilderness Battlefield.

Historians and Civil War buffs are fearful the Walmart store will draw traffic and more commerce to an area within the historic boundaries of the Wilderness, where generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first met in battle 145 years ago and where 145,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fought and more than 29,000 were killed or injured. One-fourth of the Wilderness is protected.
But they could not sway supervisors, who said they didn't see the threat.

"I cannot see how there will be any visual impact to the Wilderness Battlefield," Supervisor Chairman Lee Frame said, casting a vote for the special use permit the retailer needs to build. "I think the current proposal ... is the best way to protect the battlefield."

The retailer said construction could begin in a year.

I'm a bit of a Civil War buff and in 2005 I visited the Fredricksburg, VA battlefield, the site of a terrible slaughter of Union troops thanks to some astonishingly bad tactics by Gen. Ambrose Burnsides and the superior defenses of the Confederates. Here's a photo I took of the famous stone wall near the top of the ridge:

What you don't see in this shot is that below the stone wall the battlefield is now one big housing development. The area in which the Union forces tried to advance up the hill is hidden by the groups of homes (it's gotta be spooky walking around out there at night). Trying to picture the scene in my mind as I walked along that stone wall was rather difficult since much of the original battlefield is now gone.

In 2003 I visited the battlefield at New Market, VA, a battle I'd never heard of until that day. That site is pretty much as it originally looked:

That's why I kind of have mixed feelings about this story. On one hand life must go on and it probably doesn't make sense to try and preserve every historic battlefield, especially since most of them are just big empty pieces of ground. But at the same time these locations were important parts of our history.

Judging by what I read in the piece it seems that the battlefield itself is not in jeopardy from the presence of a Wal-Mart, but some people may be using that as an excuse to keep the giant retailer out.

History marches on.