McMansionizing History

He and I are driving down Interstate 95, heading toward Fredericksburg, Va., the small town on the Rappahannock River where, along a 10-mile arc, the Union and Confederate armies fought four legendary battles -- Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House -- from December 1862 through May 1864. Lighthizer is behind the wheel of an SUV: a pale-skinned, freckled man of medium height and build, with thinning reddish hair, expressive features and a sometimes goofy grin. The singular feature of his personality, a sly candor, won him the affection of the Maryland press corps during his eight years as Anne Arundel's county executive and four years as transportation secretary under then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

He is a Democrat who delights in political incorrectness. He recalls -- jokingly, I believe -- that when one deal to protect a battlefield was hung up over the fate of the feral cats that inhabited the property, he toyed with the notion of delivering a few feline corpses, like the horse's head in "The Godfather," to the animal-loving landowner's doorstep.

Lighthizer's political acumen and deal-making skills have been put to the test trying to save the "hallowed ground" where more than 600,000 Americans lost their lives.

For a century after the Civil War, there was little cause to fret about its battlegrounds. In recent decades, that has changed. Entire battlefields have been lost to sprawl in Franklin, Tenn., and Atlanta. From the red clay around Richmond, developments with names such as Stonewall Estates have sprouted where Lee stopped the Union drive to capture the Confederate capital in 1862. Even the historic vistas at Antietam and Gettysburg have been put at risk, as the tendrils of exurban Washington creep into Western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. In 1997, the federal government's Civil War Sites Advisory Commission published an updated survey of 384 "principal" battlegrounds and warned: "This nation's Civil War heritage is in grave danger. It is disappearing under buildings, parking lots, and highways {lcub}hellip{rcub} We may lose fully two-thirds of the principal battlefields."

"I will give you an example," Lighthizer says. "You know about Pickett's Charge? It was a charge by 13,000 men, more or less, across a mile of open ground, supported by artillery, attacking a wall. What do you know about the Battle of Franklin? Well, it was an attack by 25,000 men -- twice the number -- over two miles of open ground, with no artillery support against a {lcub}hellip{rcub} heavily fortified line, with significantly more casualties.

"And you know why most people haven't heard about Franklin? Because they paved it over."

The route we travel down I-95 offers compelling proof. For years, it was a lightly populated stretch of pine woods, creeks and rivers. Now, with its housing developments, malls and outlet stores, the land is being consumed at a rapid pace. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, six are in Virginia, including Prince William, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties along the I-95 corridor. The boom has generated a backlash. Development-friendly county officials are being pressured by new residents, who want additional open space, fewer traffic jams and better planning.

Under Lighthizer, the trust has found ways to tap that slow-growth sentiment, which is ironic, given that Lighthizer presided over a period of rapid development as a county executive in the 1980s and as transportation secretary in the 1990s. Back then, contributions from developers fueled his political campaigns. In Anne Arundel, he concedes, "we issued 3,000 building permits a year, in some years."

Yet, in a way, this makes Lighthizer a cunning soldier in the war he's now waging against development. When he arrived at the trust, he recognized that his group could not outbid developers, who were inflating the value of land from about $2,000 an acre to as much as $40,000 an acre. "They would price us out of existence," he says. "But the land-use process at the local level is often very political. I knew how to stop rezoning." He had seen it done by determined residents who had sometimes thwarted projects he'd supported. "You can aggressively, as we have done, start grass-roots efforts to put the pressure on local officials.

"If we can compromise, we will do it -- and have done it," Lighthizer says. "But if we engage [developers] in battle, we want to make the battle so nasty and so brutal that even if we lose, they won't ever want to cross our path again.

"Like somebody said after the Chancellorsville fight: Now all we have to do is bark."

"This is the Zoan ridge," says Robert Krick, who served as the National Park Service's chief historian for some of Virginia's most important battlefields before retiring several years ago. "It is the highest ground from here, eastward, to somewhere in France. Wonderful high ground. And just in front of you is where -- when Joe Hooker did not have the nerve to come out of the Wilderness and take this dominating high ground -- Stonewall Jackson bared his teeth, and Hooker collapsed upon himself."