4 Area Sites Of Civil War Battles Listed As Imperiled

Two famous Civil War battlefields in Maryland and two in Virginia have been placed on the Civil War Preservation Trust's annual list of endangered sites, the trust announced yesterday.

The battlefields at Maryland's Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg, and the Monocacy River, east of Frederick, made the list along with Virginia's Cold Harbor, near Richmond, and Cedar Creek, in the Shenandoah Valley.

Antietam, site of the war's bloodiest one-day battle, is threatened by the possibility of construction of a cellphone tower that would soar 30 feet above the surrounding tree line, the trust said.

The Monocacy battlefield is threatened by, among other things, the possibility of a waste-to-energy facility being built just outside the park, the trust said. It was at that battlefield in 1864 that Union forces slowed a large Confederate raiding force headed for Washington.

At Cedar Creek, the site of the Confederacy's last major stand in the Shenandoah Valley, a limestone mine could be expanded to an area next door, according to the trust report.

And Cold Harbor, site of an especially bloody and fruitless Union assault in 1864, remains under increasing pressure from residential development, the trust said.

"When we say endangered, we don't mean lost," O. James Lighthizer, the trust president, said in making the announcement at the National Press Club in downtown Washington. "What we mean is if we don't do something fast, [if] we don't do something now, that endangered land will in fact become lost."

The trust raises money and seeks easements and partnerships to protect endangered parcels, Lighthizer said.

"We're not against growth," he said. "We are suggesting the growth has got to be rational. It's got to be sensitive. And it's got to be cognizant of the fact that this country has some precious resources, not just natural but historic."

On hand for the announcement was country music star Trace Adkins, who said his great-great-grandfather fought in the war with the Confederacy's 31st Louisiana regiment and was wounded and captured at Vicksburg, Miss.

Adkins retold the story he heard as a teenager from his grandfather in Webster Parish, La., where he grew up.

Adkins, wearing a black cowboy hat and boots and sporting a long ponytail, said he felt blessed to have heard his grandfather's account.

"I am passionate about this," he said. "We are a young country. . . . We don't have thousand-year-old castles. And years from now, we won't have thousand-year-old battlefields . . . if we keep going at the rate we're going now. We'll just pave them over . . . and nobody will have any idea."