Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 5, 1994 TAG: 9412070164
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER AND ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ When the state reveals plans for the futuristic "smart road" this week, the public will see two proposed routes that flow around a narrow section of land like a river around a sandbar.
On this island - a mountain ridge in eastern Montgomery County - the smooth coneflower grows in spotty patches, and a Civil War-era cemetery, with but one marked headstone, is the final resting place for hundreds of Confederate soldiers.
The flower - an endangered species - and the cemetery have forced the designers of the smart road to come up with costly and time-consuming plan revisions.
The smart road, estimated to cost more than $50 million, is envisioned as a six-mile stretch of highway between Interstate 81 and Blacksburg that backers predict will shorten travel time between Virginia Tech and Roanoke, serve as a test bed for futuristic cars and safety equipment, and bring money and jobs to the area.
The Virginia Department of Transportation says it often has to shift routes and redesign road paths when such sites show up.
"It happens all the time," said Dan Brugh, resident engineer with the department's Christiansburg office. "Those types of things do occur, and we have to go ahead with them."
Members of the Blacksburg chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy own the old cemetery and have looked after it for most of this century.
Visiting the graveyard earlier this year, UDC President Dorothy Bodell was alarmed by the sight of surveying stakes and orange flagging tape tied to the fence.
"There's somebody's great-grandfather in there," Bodell said. "It's not right to run a bulldozer over it."
To avoid exhuming soldiers' remains and relocating their graves, VDOT redrew the smart road corridor to avoid the cemetery.
But the department found a potentially more significant nemesis this summer with discovery of the federally protected coneflower.
Its discovery, directly in the proposed path of the road, forced VDOT to come up with two alternatives that the public will see for the first time this week at a meeting in Blacksburg.
"It can change the road, for sure," said Tom Wieboldt, a curator at the Virginia Tech herbarium.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the flower an endangered species in October 1992. At the time, VDOT was finishing up its environmental impact study of the smart road corridor, said Paul Johnson, environmental engineer with the department's Salem district.
The study, completed in 1993, did not take note of the flower; but shortly thereafter, the department was alerted by the Natural Heritage Program, which manages a computer database listing endangered species, Johnson said.
In June, the department hired a George Mason University biologist to conduct a survey, which turned up several patches of the flower in the road's path. "That's when we backed up" and began working on alternative routes, Johnson said.
Even so, the two new routes are not without concerns. They have possible historical and ecological drawbacks of their own. For example, the northern route runs directly through the 19th-century Montgomery White Sulphur Springs resort site, which VDOT has classified as historically significant.
In 1993, Bodell, the local United Daughters of the Confederacy president, published the only complete history of the resort because "very few people knew anything about it."
Constructed in 1855-56 in a narrow valley bordering Den Creek, Montgomery White Sulphur Springs was a large, U-shaped complex containing 25 structures.
In season, the resort would welcome hundreds of socialites for music, dancing and sports such as horse racing. In 1872, the board of the newly created Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College - later renamed Virginia Tech - held its first meeting there.
From 1862-65, the resort was pressed into Civil War service as a military hospital. Hundreds of soldiers from across the South were brought there to be treated for gunshot wounds and disease.
Interred beneath wooden headstones were 265 soldiers who died at the converted hospital. Today, the graveyard that the UDC owns contains only a number of rectangular depressions in the ground and a single, hand-hewn fieldstone bearing the name of a Texas soldier.
After being damaged by flood and fire, Montgomery White Sulphur Springs declined until it was closed in 1904 and was "sold off, torn down and carried away," Bodell said. A single guest cottage in a pasture along Den Creek is all that remains.
Last week, an archaeological team from Virginia Commonwealth University hired by VDOT combed the old resort site and found pieces of ceramics, glass, bricks and nails.
The site is "potentially significant" and warrants a more extensive archaeological reconnaissance, said Christopher Egghart, supervisor of the archaeological team. That could take quite a while on such an extensive site, he added.
For its size, the coneflower continues to loom large over the smart road's southern alternative route. VDOT has identified patches of the plant - a spindly flower that grows up to 5 feet tall and is found in only four states - on both sides of the route.
While Wieboldt said there is no known use for it now, other flowers in the same family have been used in a variety of pharmaceuticals. Regardless, its usefulness is not a criterion for its listing as endangered, he said.
Even if the road does not run directly through the flowers, Wieboldt said, nearby construction, vibrations from traffic and pollution caused by exhaust could affect them.
"We don't know what the effects are going to be," he said.
VDOT officials say the smart road cannot be built until all environmental concerns - including cultural and historical issues - are satisfied.
The department expects to begin accepting bids in late 1996 for construction of the first two miles of the road. Gov. George Allen pledged that stretch would be built for experimental purposes after Virginia Tech was allowed into a General Motors-led consortium of companies that won a $150 million federal grant this summer for "smart car" research. Those two miles will not have an impact on either the coneflower or the resort site.
But Brugh, the engineer, admits that before the full length of the road is built, other environmental or historical concerns could be found.
"There's absolutely nothing to say that this is the last one we'll encounter on the project," he said, but "those are things that we can handle, and will. The road is a reality."
Bodell hopes the road is not built over the site of the old resort. "I'm just afraid the road will destroy a very historic place. I'm concerned that too many of our historic places are being destroyed in the name of progress."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***