Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 14, 1995 TAG: 9502140091
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB BAIRD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Concern by private owners of these sites centers on the potential lowering of land values by historic designation that restricts many uses. Preservationists, on the other hand, point out that once the integrity of a battlefield has been lost by development it cannot be restored.
Although preservationists seemingly have the moral high ground to their credit, their solutions nearly always fall into a category that is to a property owner what an unfunded mandate is to a state or locality. They feel that the comfort a landowner supposedly gets when government, at any level, renders his land useless and worthless for a good and noble purpose should more than make up for the uncompensated restrictions on use, the lowering of property values, and potential loss of development revenue. How easy it is to mandate solutions costly to others when one's personal outlay is zero.
Property rights have been recognized as a fundamental freedom for millennia. Yet there must be limits, such as when exercise of a right infringes on the rights of others.
While most of us would agree, for instance, on the concept of freedom of speech, would we assent to someone burning a personal copy of a great historical document, such as the Declaration of Independence, as a political statement? Would we concur if someone wished to fold a letter written by Thomas Jefferson and cut paper dolls out of it? Yet, desecration of our Civil War battlefields, which are in a sense only larger "historical documents," is exactly the same thing.
From this come two conclusions upon which most reasonable people should concur: (1) Battlefields must be preserved. (2) Battlefield owners must be justly and fairly compensated. Otherwise, we risk a smaller version of civil war in our own day.
There are numerous solutions and compromises that can and should be worked out to preserve these battlefields. For instance, property developers may recognize that preservation of a Civil War battlefield as a green area or park may increase the value of surrounding land enough to offset the loss of battlefield land as part of the development.
But the most important mechanism may be the people themselves, not via more taxes, but through the vast areas of public land currently held by the U.S. government.
Fully one-third of the land area of the United States is publicly held. Privately held Civil War battlefield land is probably at least as valuable as the most desirable of the publicly owned land. Congress should therefore establish a program that would trade public land for private battlefield land, or where public lands are directly sold and the proceeds used for battlefield purchase and preservation.
Some believe that if you have seen one battlefield, you have seen them all. Others view each battlefield as an integral and important chapter in the total story of the war that must be preserved for posterity, perhaps even for reasons that have not yet been considered or discussed.
Because of the simple fact that we cannot restore a battlefield or recreate earthworks or other features once houses or shopping malls have been built, it seems a wise and prudent course to err on the side of preservation. If we allow battlefield destruction simply because we have no current interest in them, it may well be that we will be cursed by future generations.
Swapping or selling public land to obtain in its place historic or otherwise important sites would allow preservation of the most important properties, while at the same time allowing for no net loss of private property.
Bob Baird, a former senior geologist for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, lives near Richmond.
by CNB