Sprawl And Development Threaten Historic Battlefields
Sprawling housing developments and shopping center parking lots threaten many historic battlefields, such as the site of Abraham Lincoln's famed Gettysburg Address.
"What Abraham Lincoln couldn't have foreseen delivering the Gettysburg Address that afternoon was that a Southern colonel would one day claim this hallowed ground in the form of a KFC just beyond its gates. Or that the site of the battle's largest field hospital would be paved over. Today, a sizable chunk of Camp Letterman serves as the parking lot for Giant supermarket – a salmon slab of concrete with a few benches and two small plaques the only reminder of its historical significance."
"Last year activists fought off the unthinkable: a 5,000-slot casino within a mile of the battleground. Yet Gettysburg stubbornly remains on a list of "Endangered Battlefields" compiled annually by the nonprofit Civil War Preservation Trust."
"It's not just Gettysburg either. The storied sites pored over in every American History class and obsessively revisited by Civil War buffs are far from uniformly protected. From suburban sprawl to mining to a lack of funds for maintenance and repair, threats to Civil War battlefields are legion."
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European battefields
"Europeans who come here are astonished by how much battlefield land has been preserved in the national park system," he says.
That may be because of Europe's higher population densities or the sheer number of battlefields in the continent's bloody past make it difficult to preserve the sites. It was sad to see a go kart track next to a little battlefield known as Waterloo.