Overlooked Allies?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch carries a story this morning on yesterday's announcement from the U.S. Dept. of the Interior that the federal government will be kicking in $2 mil. to help the Civil War Preservation Trust pay off its $12 mil. recent acquisition of the Slaughter Pen Farm near Fredericksburg, along the Tidewater Trail.

Virginia's close proximity to Washington made it home to many of the Civil War's major battles a century and a half ago, and makes it attractive to some of the most aggressive development today (the Virginia Conservation Coaltion recently publicized that at our current rate of development, the same proportion of Virginia will be developed in the next 25 years alone than has been developed in the all the years since the Commonwealth's founding), but as yesterday's grant announcement might indicate, the land's Confederate history could be a key in protecting its future.

The 208-acre area was being marketed as prime territory for developers as recently as December of last year. The CWPT's succcess in securing the property for historical preservation merits a closer look from conservation advocates here in the Commonwealth. At the conference, Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Bill Howell, whose own environmental record is generally pretty dismal, commented:

"preserving sites like the Slaughter Pen Farm is the exact purpose that the legislature had in mind when it inaugurated the [Virginia Civil War Historic Site Preservation Fund] program this spring."

A strange bedfellows alliance, for certain, but federal money for and General Assembly attention to conservation is cause for celebration, whatever the motivation.