Last Step for 175-Mile 'Journey' Historic Area

A proposal to declare a 175-mile stretch from Monticello to Gettysburg a National Heritage Area has cleared its final legislative hurdle and awaits President Bush's signature.

The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to grant the designation to the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, a corridor that encompasses parts of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Senate approved the measure last month.

For three years, activists and legislative leaders have been seeking the designation, which they say will boost tourism and bring federal grants to an area with a high concentration of presidential homes, Civil War battlefields and other historic sites.

"Boy, it has been a long road," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), one of the main proponents of the legislation. "It truly is hallowed ground, and I think it is really where American history began."

The legislation was controversial when Wolf introduced it in 2006. Property-rights groups and conservative activists argued that such designations can be used to limit development.

Supporters noted that the designation does not include limits on development. But critics said it would give ammunition to those who want to preserve an upscale, quaint way of life.

"The brains behind this . . . in the Piedmont area have a long history of antipathy toward growth," said Ronald D. Utt, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Utt wrote a paper last year critical of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership, which raised money and lobbied for the legislation.

"It gives them an opportunity to essentially invoke all these things and stop growth they simply view as tacky."

Advocates of the proposal acknowledge that one of the reasons they are pleased with the designation is that it will bring attention to the region's historical significance and natural beauty, and that this could ultimately help protect it.

"I think that when there's an awareness of something, it is a certain level of protection in itself," said Suzie Blanchard, an owner of the Inn at Meander Plantation in Madison, Va. "We have nice, beautiful vistas. We have a view of the mountains. We look over fields and woods. It wouldn't be the same looking over houses."

Among the sites in the heritage area is the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, where 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after a 12-hour battle Sept. 17, 1862. There are nine former homes of U.S. presidents, said Cate Mages Wyatt, president of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership.

But the greatest beneficiaries will be the lesser-known attractions such as the Graffiti House outside of Culpeper, Wyatt said. The walls inside what was believed to have been a field hospital bear the scrawlings of Union and Confederate soldiers who were there during the war. As part of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, the museum is likely to see an infusion of visitors, she said.

"We all are subject to taking for granted the riches in our own backyard," Wyatt said. "It is a reminder to others that we are blessed by living in this remarkable area."

If signed into law by Bush, the Journey Through Hallowed Ground will join 37 other areas in the National Park Service's National Heritage Area program, which is designed to highlight areas of historical, cultural and natural significance.