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A Union infantry regiment at Camp Northumberland near Washington, circa 1861. This shot from the Mathew Brady Collection shows a camp similar to the one mapped out by local historians on a tract where Brookeridge subdivision is to be built in Stafford.
Historian Glenn Trimmer holds a Union soldier's breastplate,
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Attorney John McBride (left), historian Glenn Trimmer and Supervisor Kandy Hilliard examine part of the Union 12th Corps winter camp in eastern Stafford. The three are working together on a plan to identify and protect the county's historic sites. |
By CLINT SCHEMMER
It seems the unlikeliest of alliances: The developer whose contractor bulldozed a Civil War fort in Stafford County joining forces with the preservationists who practically wept over the earthworks' destruction.
But that's just what is happening in the hilly woods near Aquia Landing in eastern Stafford.
Stafford's Aquia District supervisor, in concert with a new citizens group, Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites, has persuaded SYG Associates Inc. of Warrenton to commemorate the obliterated fort. SYG has also sponsored documentation and excavation of the nearby site of a Union Army winter encampment, and will erect historical markers at both.
The nonprofit group, which includes a few dozen members at this early stage, formed in reaction to the demise of the large earthworks, named Redoubt No. 3 by Union officers, in February.
Initially, an attorney for SYG questioned whether the flat area left after a contractor cleared some trees really was a redoubt--to the angry astonishment of local historians who had seen and photographed its rectangular 70-feet-long, 12-feet-high earthen walls.
But later, after John McBride of the Manassas law firm of Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian investigated further and spoke with SYG's president, veteran builder Jimmy Ghadban, he changed his mind.
And once McBride had paid a couple of visits to the White Oak Civil War Museum in southern Stafford and talked with its founder, D.P. Newton, and another historian, Glenn Trimmer, he brokered an agreement between his client and the historians. Newton and Trimmer suggested marking the fort's site with a permanent monument and preserving another Civil War site on a nearby SYG tract.
Tonight, at Supervisor Kandy Hilliard's invitation and with Ghadban present, Newton and Trimmer will brief the Stafford Board of Supervisors on the first fruits of that partnership. They will outline a new public-private strategy that could document Stafford's fast-disappearing Civil War sites, help preserve those places, better inform the public of their existence, and perhaps save developers some money while doing it.
"It's unfortunate everything was triggered by Redoubt No. 3, because if [Ghadban] had known earlier, he would have been doing this anyway," McBride said, describing his client as someone who "has a sense of history."
Ghadban built his first subdivision in Manassas in 1974, and has been an active midsize developer in Prince William, Fauquier, Fairfax, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties.
"He wants to work with the communities he builds in, because he plans to build in Stafford for a number of years," McBride said. " He wants to the do the right thing for the community."
The builder and historians' joint effort focuses on the site of Redoubt No. 3 in SYG's Poplar Hills residential tract off Brooke Road and on SYG's nearby Brookeridge subdivision, where the 12th Corps of the Union Army camped in the winter of 1862.
McBride said he expects the collaboration will yield three results:
A carefully mapped and documented field study by local historians, coordinated by Newton and Trimmer, of the 12th Corps winter camp. Artifacts found at that site will be turned over to Stafford for the county museum that local historians, and some county officials, have long hoped will be built.
A set of cast-metal historical markers, much like Virginia's state roadside markers, to point out several historic sites on or near SYG property. SYG and the friends group propose that they bear the Stafford County seal, and hope they will be the beginning of a county signage program with an accompanying brochure, much like Virginia's Civil War Trails system or the marker program in neighboring Prince William County, to mark and describe Stafford's most significant Civil War sites for residents and visitors.
A large, inscribed granite monument on the site of Redoubt No. 3.
The first of the metal markers would sit near the Redoubt No. 3 site, calling attention to it and the stone monument nearby. The second would be placed on Brooke Road, and direct people up the hill to the Redoubt No. 3 site.
The third marker, posted along a new road in Brookeridge, would call attention to nearby Fort McLean, also known as Redoubt No. 2, which lies on another landowner's property not far from SYG's development. That large and well-preserved earthwork is the last surviving Union redoubt in the area. Fresh bulldozer tracks are pressed into the mud within a stone's throw of its high ramparts, and that worries the Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites.
(Redoubt No. 1, a 60-foot-square moated earthwork built at the Watson House on Aquia Creek, was plowed under for a farm field in the 1950s.)
Additionally, SYG plans to dedicate easements in Brookeridge to preserve some of the places where 12th Corps troops built their huts and survived wintertime. Some of the huts had chimneys made of scavenged brick, with fireplace lintels fashioned of torn-up track from the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad.
By partnering with the friends group, SYG can give families and the community a better appreciation of Virginia history--at the same time its historical efforts help sell homes, McBride said.
And this can be done at a relatively modest cost, he said.
SYG has committed to pay $30,000 to provide the granite monument and metal historical markers. It will spend $40,000 on a Phase 1 archaeological study of Redoubt No. 3's site and the 12th Corps campsite.
McBride recalls that after The Free Lance-Star reported Staffordians were saying the redoubt had been bulldozed, he was told to find out what happened, stop work on the site, and "make sure it didn't happen again."
That's what Newton and Trimmer and their group are trying to do, too. The two men don't hold SYG blameless, but appreciate and respect that it is trying to make amends.
They're still upset that Stafford failed to realize, or advise SYG of, the presence of Redoubt No. 3--a major site that was described in a recent county history book, noted on a Stafford County Historical Society map, and could be found with a quick Web search.
The result was that a fortification that took some 400 men about 10 days to construct 14 decades ago took only one or two men with heavy earth-moving equipment to level.
To avoid any kind of a repeat, the friends group aims to help fill in the missing pieces in Stafford's historic records--perhaps more swiftly than can be accomplished by the county's venture with the National Park Service to create a historic-sites database. The database work was to have started in June, and will take one to two years to complete.
Spotsylvania County has had such a catalog for 13 years, and compares every subdivision plan or zoning application that comes through the planning office with it.
"One thing that Redoubt 3 showed is that you can't leave preservation to county officials, or developers, or state and federal agencies," Trimmer said. "If you do that, we're going to lose."
Newton said he hopes Stafford officials will take advantage of the group's knowledge of the area's lesser-known Civil War sites, much as a Western explorer might retain an Indian guide.
Supervisor Hilliard has been instrumental, pressing SYG to be generous, tromping through the woods to visit the 12th Corps camp with McBride, Newton and Trimmer, and talking up the public-private initiative with other supervisors and county staff.
"I believe there's a way to find common ground with developers, so we're better able to preserve these kinds of sites," Hilliard said yesterday.
The friends group draws from a diverse crowd of historians, relic hunters and preservationists. McBride said Newton and Trimmer have more in-depth knowledge of the two sites they've studied for SYG than the professional archaeologist the builder hired.
"Those two gentlemen have put untold hours and effort into preserving history in Stafford. They don't just talk about it, they actually do it," McBride said. "I've been very impressed with their research and knowledge. They are a huge resource."
The friends group's main mission is to document and preserve Stafford's major Civil War terrain features, not go after artifacts in the ground, Trimmer and Newton said.
These historians--newcomers as well as old-timers--have been working feverishly so the soldiers of the 1860s, and the places they called home, aren't forgotten.
"It will be hard to forget these soldiers were here when people see signs [posted] that they were roaming these hills," Trimmer said. "It's another way for county history to be preserved and recorded, and it's a much more visible way. A sign like that is hard to forget."
