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Saving Slaughter Pen Developer, Trust join to protect Civil War site
Civil War Preservation Trust to acquire its most important battlefield ever--Slaughter Pen Farm--just outside Fredericksburg.
Date published: 3/29/2006
By RUSTY DENNEN For generations, an oasis of green and gold--rolling farmland and corn-stubble fields--has sat untouched in a time warp along Tidewater Trail next to Shannon Airport. The site, one of the most significant but largely unknown landscapes of the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, looks much the same today as it did during the Civil War. When Pierson family heirs in Pennsylvania recently put the Spotsylvania County land on the market for $12.3 million, James Lighthizer and Michael A. Jones knew what they had to do. Lighthizer, president of the Washington-based Civil War Preservation Trust, and Jones, principal owner of the Tricord Cos., teamed up to save what has been described as the most significant unprotected piece of land connected with the battle. Tricord signed a contract in February to purchase the 205 acres, intending to sign it over to CWPT at cost. Meanwhile, the trust is launching its biggest-ever fundraising campaign to come up with the money. Tricord helped in a similar deal last year to allow the trust to buy 140 acres on the Chancellorsville Battlefield in Spotsylvania outside the National Park Service boundary. The principals in the deal, representatives of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust, which also helped in the transaction, and two National Park Service representatives gathered yesterday for a look at what is known locally as the Pierson Farm. "Hands down, this is the single most important piece of ground" connected with the 1862 battle, Lighthizer said. "If you don't have this, you don't have the Battle of Fredericksburg." The fighting through Fredericksburg, with its carnage at Marye's Heights, is etched in the nation's collective memory. But the rest of the story played out farther south on and around the farm, where Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's 2nd Corps battled Union Gen. William Franklin's Left Grand Division. At one point, half the Confederate army was concentrated along the railroad tracks southwest of the property, waiting for the Union attack across the farm. In some of the most desperate fighting of the day, Union forces under George Meade and John Gibbon punched through Confederate lines for a time before being driven back by Southern reinforcements.
Date published: 3/29/2006
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