The Beep Goes On
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- Jan 11, 2006
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http://interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1280
We were always told that our forefathers fought for this land. Considering what we are doing with it, why did they bother?
By William Marvel
Twenty years ago this September I concluded a lengthy hike up and down the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal by crossing the Potomac at White’s Ferry and bushwhacking my way down the Virginia side to the battlefield of Ball’s Bluff. At that time the riverbank consisted mostly of rough pastureland, divided by barbed-wire fences and some muddy creeks. The bluff itself consisted of a sheer limestone cliff towering about a hundred feet above the river at its highest point: it was impossible to mistake, although I had never seen it before.
There, on the evening of October 21, 1861, some 1800 Union soldiers were driven back into the river by a like number of Confederates from Mississippi and Virginia. Armed only with a knowledge of Civil War maps, I was still able to find my way to the battlefield above the bluff and to locate certain landmarks. It was also possible to follow old roads a few miles downstream to a floodplain where a less bloody sidelight of the battle took place. When I had satisfied my curiosity I shouldered my pack and started into the quaint and historic town of Leesburg, noticing on the way that a couple of new houses were going up on the old dirt road leading away from Ball’s Bluff.
Not until the summer of 2003 did I return to that part of Loudoun County. By then the battlefield at Ball’s Bluff had been almost completely obliterated by development. The downstream portion, overlooking Edwards’s Ferry, had been bulldozed into a few square miles of townhouses, and the floodplain where Union soldiers had lain for three miserable days had been turned into a golf course for the well-paid federal employees who filled those townhouses. Route 7 and Route 15, which had remained relatively rural highways in 1986, had been sacrificed to strip development that required numerous lanes, bypasses, and massive overpasses. The principal Confederate earthwork lay pinched between a corporate building and parking lot on one side and a housing development on the other, with playground equipment intruding into the interior of the fort.
Last week I returned to Leesburg to enlighten a local group on the only subject in which I can claim much expertise. I approached Loudoun County thinking of it as one of the country’s most extreme examples of the evils of overdevelopment, and I may have been correct in that thought, but I also supposed that nothing could be worse than what I had witnessed in 2003. In that expectation I was dead wrong. Coming into town from a different direction this time, I passed miles of diced-up pastureland, where sat hundreds, and probably thousands, of trophy homes on five- and ten-acre lots. Then, a few miles out of Leesburg, I crested a rise to see one vast ocean of serried rooftops, stretching all the way to the Potomac River and out of sight downstream. In landscape and in culture, Loudoun County has been completely destroyed.
Some counties in Virginia have avoided that fate by imposing strict conservationist measures, including 85-percent greenspace requirements. Developers and their political shills have naturally fought that, reducing greenspace demands to 65 and even 50 percent, and the counties that have succumbed to such pressure are now facing growth problems of their own. Developers here in New Hampshire whine endlessly about having to preserve 15 to 25 percent of their projects in greenspace, and they manage to convince many voters that such demands are unreasonable, but even such minimal requirements will never protect the flavor of a rural community: greenspace accounts for 40 percent of the island of Manhattan.
Half a century ago Clifford Dowdey wrote a history of the Confederacy that he called The Land They Fought For. Technically, of course, the armies of the Civil War fought for political ideals, but most of those soldiers (at least in the South) seemed motivated more by a desire to protect their homeland. The image of the homeland includes the emotional attachment to family and culture, as well as a sentimental regard for the actual landscape. The families and culture of that era have all crumbled to dust. As tribute to their struggle, therefore, we have only the political ideals and the land for which most of them harbored such a personal attachment. Considering what their descendants have done with those ideals and that land, they need not have bothered at all.
William Marvel is a free-lance writer and U.S. Army veteran living in northern New Hampshire. He is the author of Andersonville: The Last Depot and, most recently, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War.
Posted Monday, May 15, 2006
We were always told that our forefathers fought for this land. Considering what we are doing with it, why did they bother?
By William Marvel
Twenty years ago this September I concluded a lengthy hike up and down the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal by crossing the Potomac at White’s Ferry and bushwhacking my way down the Virginia side to the battlefield of Ball’s Bluff. At that time the riverbank consisted mostly of rough pastureland, divided by barbed-wire fences and some muddy creeks. The bluff itself consisted of a sheer limestone cliff towering about a hundred feet above the river at its highest point: it was impossible to mistake, although I had never seen it before.
There, on the evening of October 21, 1861, some 1800 Union soldiers were driven back into the river by a like number of Confederates from Mississippi and Virginia. Armed only with a knowledge of Civil War maps, I was still able to find my way to the battlefield above the bluff and to locate certain landmarks. It was also possible to follow old roads a few miles downstream to a floodplain where a less bloody sidelight of the battle took place. When I had satisfied my curiosity I shouldered my pack and started into the quaint and historic town of Leesburg, noticing on the way that a couple of new houses were going up on the old dirt road leading away from Ball’s Bluff.
Not until the summer of 2003 did I return to that part of Loudoun County. By then the battlefield at Ball’s Bluff had been almost completely obliterated by development. The downstream portion, overlooking Edwards’s Ferry, had been bulldozed into a few square miles of townhouses, and the floodplain where Union soldiers had lain for three miserable days had been turned into a golf course for the well-paid federal employees who filled those townhouses. Route 7 and Route 15, which had remained relatively rural highways in 1986, had been sacrificed to strip development that required numerous lanes, bypasses, and massive overpasses. The principal Confederate earthwork lay pinched between a corporate building and parking lot on one side and a housing development on the other, with playground equipment intruding into the interior of the fort.
Last week I returned to Leesburg to enlighten a local group on the only subject in which I can claim much expertise. I approached Loudoun County thinking of it as one of the country’s most extreme examples of the evils of overdevelopment, and I may have been correct in that thought, but I also supposed that nothing could be worse than what I had witnessed in 2003. In that expectation I was dead wrong. Coming into town from a different direction this time, I passed miles of diced-up pastureland, where sat hundreds, and probably thousands, of trophy homes on five- and ten-acre lots. Then, a few miles out of Leesburg, I crested a rise to see one vast ocean of serried rooftops, stretching all the way to the Potomac River and out of sight downstream. In landscape and in culture, Loudoun County has been completely destroyed.
Some counties in Virginia have avoided that fate by imposing strict conservationist measures, including 85-percent greenspace requirements. Developers and their political shills have naturally fought that, reducing greenspace demands to 65 and even 50 percent, and the counties that have succumbed to such pressure are now facing growth problems of their own. Developers here in New Hampshire whine endlessly about having to preserve 15 to 25 percent of their projects in greenspace, and they manage to convince many voters that such demands are unreasonable, but even such minimal requirements will never protect the flavor of a rural community: greenspace accounts for 40 percent of the island of Manhattan.
Half a century ago Clifford Dowdey wrote a history of the Confederacy that he called The Land They Fought For. Technically, of course, the armies of the Civil War fought for political ideals, but most of those soldiers (at least in the South) seemed motivated more by a desire to protect their homeland. The image of the homeland includes the emotional attachment to family and culture, as well as a sentimental regard for the actual landscape. The families and culture of that era have all crumbled to dust. As tribute to their struggle, therefore, we have only the political ideals and the land for which most of them harbored such a personal attachment. Considering what their descendants have done with those ideals and that land, they need not have bothered at all.
William Marvel is a free-lance writer and U.S. Army veteran living in northern New Hampshire. He is the author of Andersonville: The Last Depot and, most recently, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War.
Posted Monday, May 15, 2006
I could go into a lengthy dissertation but, realistically, need I say more?
