Groups Celebrate Saving 209-Plus Acres At Third Winchester Battle
The Battle of Third Winchester (also called Opequon, after a nearby creek) was “the largest and most costly battle fought in the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley,” according to W. Denman Zirkle, executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation (SVBF). “It was the battle that presaged the loss of the Shenandoah Valley for the Confederacy.” The 1864 clash of 15,200 Confederates in Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s Army of the Valley with the 39,240 Union troops in Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah resulted in more than 8,6000 casualties, according to a 1992 National Park Service (NPS) study by historian David W. Lowe. The Union XIX Corps suffered 40 percent casualties and lost every regimental commander. A coalition of groups pooled $3.35 million to purchase the two tracts totaling 209.81 acres, which comprise Huntsberry Farm. The SVBF closed on the transaction Aug. 7, 2009. The two properties are currently assessed at a combined total of $314,700 according to Frederick County real estate tax records. The National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program (ABPP) contributed $1.23 million; the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation (funded by the Commonwealth) $1 million; the SVBT $628,000; the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) $380,000; and Frederick County gave $112,000 from its Historic and Open Space Preservation Fund. The farm’s nearly 210 acres combine nicely with adjacent battlefield land owned by the SVBF (144 acres) and CWPT (222 acres) to form over 575 contiguous acres of the battlefield. This is far from saving the entire battlefield, though. The core area cited in Lowe’s study is 4,914 acres. The celebratory press conference was hosted on the Huntsberry Farm by the SVBF and CWPT. In his opening remarks Zirkle addressed a claim sometimes made by opponents of battlefield preservation — most recently heard during the debate over the proposed Wal-mart Supercenter at the entrance to the Wilderness Battlefield in Orange County, Va. “I recently read an article indicating that if we preserved every piece of ground in Virginia on which blood was shed in the Civil War, a huge portion of our Commonwealth would be untouchable. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Zirkle said. “The truth is that about 1.8 percent of Virginia is comprised of battlefields and we are losing them daily. To illustrate our challenge, that same figure, 1.8 percent, represents the amount of land actually lost to commercial and residential development during one five-year period in the heady days of the late 1990s.” Zirkle noted more than 6,000 acres have been preserved to date in the Shenandoah Valley. “We have over 14,000 acres that have not been protected, much of which is headed for development if we do not act within the next few years. And some of these are prime battlefield areas, such as Port Republic and Cross Keys and Rockingham County and others,” he said. CWPT chairman emeritus Theodore Sedgwick recalled that the first transaction of CWPT’s predecessor organization, the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, was 222 acres at Third Winchester for $2.5 million in 1995. He pointed out the national scope of the CWPT’s work and how it has saved 28,000 acres of Civil War battlefield land across the country. Of that total, 13,000 acres are in Virginia and 1,200 of those acres are in Frederick County. The American Battlefield Protection Program is the Department of the Interior’s legislative instrument for assisting communities to identify and preserve their battlefields, its chief, Paul Hawke, explained. It covers other wars fought in America, such as the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. The ABPP has saved 16,000 acres of battlefield land in the U.S., 7,000 of which are in Virginia, Hawke said. Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, director of the state’s Department of Historic Resources, called the celebration “a great day for the Commonwealth and the nation.” She, and her boss, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, have been at the forefront of numerous battlefield preservation efforts in the Old Dominion. The featured speaker was U.S. Senator Jim Webb (Democrat, Va.), a major advocate for battlefield preservation, who praised the Huntsberry family for their “generosity and dedication to history.” Webb mentioned his family’s long history of military service, not as career soldiers but as citizen soldiers. He raised the question of what made citizen soldiers fight. As a succinct answer, he quoted from the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery: Zirkle presented Webb with a signed copy of From Winchester to Cedar Creek: The Shenandoah Campaign of 1864, by historian Jeffry D. Wert. Three generations of the Huntsberry family were at the press conference. The senior member, Bob Huntsberry Sr., said the farm had been in his family since 1762, coming to them by way of an “original grant by Lord Fairfax.” Huntsberry said there were too many family members in his generation inheriting the property to divide it, and that made it easier for them to sell it to the SVBF. “I think they will make good use of it,” he added. “We see the Huntsberry Farm acquisition as transforming the Third Winchester Battlefield from an afterthought for visitors to a genuine tourism destination,” CWPT spokesman Jim Campi recently told Civil War News last fall. “Visitors can lose themselves for hours in the unique history of this site.” A stop on the Civil War Discovery Trail, CWPT’s 222 acres have signage and trails open to the public from dawn to dusk. The SVBT’s original 144 acres and the Huntsberry Farm land are not yet accessible to the public. |
