The National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed a 175-mile swath running from Charlottesville to Gettysburg on its list of the nation’s most endangered historic places. The region encompasses six presidential homes, including James Madison’s Montpelier, Civil War battlefields and other historic sites too numerous to mention. Sadly, this picturesque piedmont of small towns and elegant horse farms is under threat by metastasizing growth in the Washington metro area.
The Washington Post, in “Trust Decries Development in Tri-State Area,” notes that a coalition of 100 groups, working under the banner of “Journey Through Hallowed Ground,” is seeking a designation from the Federal Highway Administration naming parts of Routes 15 and 20 as a National Scenic Byway. The coalition also is developing a teaching curriculum about the area at a local community college, promoting “heritage tourism” focused on the area’s many historic homes and other sites and studying the creation of a “socially responsible” investment fund to purchase land it views as threatened.
The point person in this effort is Cate Magennis Wyatt, former Secretary of Commerce and Trade in the Wilder administration. Wyatt, who lives in the village of Waterford, founded by Quakers in the 18th century, stands right in the path of unbridled growth in Loudoun County. But instead of seeking recourse to the usual array of ineffective local growth controls, she’s pursuing a market-based strategy to preserve the land she loves. First step: Create awareness that there’s something worth saving. Second step, find market-based solutions. Writes the Post:
She said that she hopes to build a public-private effort that will prove that heritage tourism can make money and that she is seeking the resources to buy endangered land to protect it. “We fully recognize that landowners have rights to sell their land, and we are earnestly trying to find a means to purchase land at market rates,” she said.
The people of the piedmont have the most to lose if their homes are overrun by McMansions and crossroads shopping centers. But all Virginians have a stake in this region. I have spent many memorable weekends motoring through the back roads of the piedmont, admiring the manicured, fenced-in fields and the old homes, and enjoying the fruit of the region’s many vineyards. There is no place more beautiful in Virginia, save possibly the Shenandoah Valley. It is the back yard of the Washington and Richmond regions, and allowing it to be despoiled with careless growth is the communal equivalent of junking our own properties with cast-off refrigerators and rusting cars.
Yet Wyatt is right: We must balance our conservationist impulse with respect for property rights, which Virginians also cherish. Let’s hope she can find the formula.