160 years later, a new Battle of the Wilderness is waged (2024)

“Hold on with a bulldog’s grip,” President Abraham Lincoln told Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in May of 1864 amid the Battle of the Wilderness, fought 44 miles north of Charlottesville, as the Union Army advanced toward Richmond, by that point the capital of the Confederacy.

Today, local nonprofit organizations are still following Lincoln’s order, this time in a fight to preserve the land of the Wilderness Battlefield from what they consider the “threat” of development.

Instead of gray-clad, musket-wielding Southerners, this coalition’s opposition is the five members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. Last April, the board approved the rezoning of 2,600, privately owned acres adjacent to the historic battleground on the edge of Orange County near the Spotsylvania border, switching it from agricultural to mixed use.

The rezoning was also the board’s stamp of approval for Wilderness Crossing, a project proposed by KEG Associates III which calls for 5,000 residential units and more than 800 acres of commercial and industrial space, 750 acres of which could potentially be allotted for a data center and distribution warehouses.

Various environmental and historical agencies have spent the past year working to halt the development’s progress, launching campaigns and lawsuits. On May 1, the coalition added another weapon to its arsenal after the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the site one of the country’s “11 Most Endangered Historic Places.”

“Big picture, we hope that this recognition by the National Trust will be a call and reminder to the public and local officials across the state that this industry, this data center, has a major impact on resources,” Don McCown, who represents Madison and Orange counties on the Piedmont Environmental Council, told The Daily Progress. “We are calling for thoughtful consideration of those impacts.”

The National Trust has assembled an annual list of historic sites in “danger of irreparable harm” since 1988. This is not the first time the Wilderness Battlefield has made an appearance; it was also included in 2010 over a similar development debate, which also caused significant public outcry in regard to a proposed Walmart Superstore near the historic property. Ultimately, the developers and county came to a compromise, and the store was built at a different location several miles away.

Though the National Trust’s designation is not associated with any form of legal protection, McCown said he believes it can still be used as a rallying cry to “remind people that this threat still exists” in order to safeguard history.

Yet, others feel a line needs to be drawn between preserving the past and advancing into the future.

“This is Virginia, every inch of Virginia is historic for one reason or another. Those of us alive today have to continue to exist and live and build,” Chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors Mark Johnson told The Daily Progress. “I’m not sure how many thousands of acres are necessary to memorialize a battlefield.”

Roughly 3,000 acres of the Wilderness Battlefield are protected from any form of development, deemed the “core” of the Battle of the Wilderness, where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s men violently clashed with Grant’s troops and more than 30,000 men died. This core is one of the four Civil War battlegrounds included in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania Battlefields Memorial National Military Park, which has been under the care of the National Park Service for almost 100 years. The park spans close to 8,000 acres, making it one of the largest protected battlefield spaces in the country.

The rest of the property is still considered a “study area” of the battle, but over the years, some of it has been acquired by private landowners, who can use it at their own discretion. Charles “Chip” King owns the mostly forested, 2,600 acres proposed for Wilderness Crossing. According to Johnson, King approached the board several years ago with the idea of erecting a large-scale housing development. His holdings were reported to be mostly undeveloped and within the Germanna-Wilderness Area, which was slated as prime for development in Orange County’s Comprehensive Plan in 2015 after the Walmart Superstore affair.

Johnson told The Daily Progress that the original plan did not involve any economic “opportunity zones” or regulations for commercial development, among other things, so the board spent two years adjusting the proposal to include these provisions as well as an on-site reservoir to meet water supply needs. The proceedings culminated at the board’s meeting last April where the rezoning ordinance passed 4-1, though not without public input.

A total of 37 people, all of whom opposed the project, spoke during the public hearing. Their concerns largely echoed issues that had been brought up by both citizens and planning commissioners during the initial review phases, including questions about the water supply and concerns over increased traffic.

One individual who addressed the packed room was Julie Bolthouse, a certified planner who serves as land use manager for the Piedmont Environmental Council. She said she was shocked by the lack of information in the application, saying it is “unquestionably the worst rezoning proposal” she has seen in her 12 years of planning.

“What it appears to actually be is a single developer getting their own private zoning ordinance, which is more permissive and flexible than any other zoning district in the county,” Bolthouse said.

A year later, Johnson still emphasizes that the board made the right decision, saying Wilderness Crossing falls within the growth area designated in the county’s comprehensive plan.

“The rezoning was in line with that, it fit in, and the majority of the board felt it was a net-positive rezoning for the community,” said Johnson. “Orange County could use additional commercial and industrial entities to keep the tax rate down on residents and farmers.”

However, some organizations, including the Piedmont Environmental Council, have taken issue with how the Wilderness Crossing negotiations were carried out before coming before the board of supervisors. Last fall, the council filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Orange County in order to obtain all of the paperwork pertaining to the rezoning after previous requests were answered with “heavily redacted documents,” said McCown.

The case was resolved in January. Orange County turned over the unredacted copies as well as several nondisclosure agreements signed by local officials, some of whom were county supervisors, with Amazon Web Services. To the Piedmont Environmental Council and other opponents of the development, this information seemed to confirm their worst fears: the construction of a data center at Wilderness Crossing.

“We’re using this to raise awareness to a larger statewide threat that’s happening to historic sites around the state mostly driven by the explosion of data center development,” said McCown. “We feel like these decisions are made without full consideration or recognition of the impacts to historic, natural, cultural resources.”

It remains unclear whether a data center, or data centers plural, will be part of Wilderness Crossing should the development move forward. Johnson said that he has not heard of any plans confirming whether a data center will be constructed on the property.

“I don’t know anything about whether it’s a data center or educational campus or going to bring big-box stores or a Starbucks,” he said. “That is not something that I have any information on.”

Whether or not a data center is a part of Wilderness Crossing, such facilities are popping up across the commonwealth, particularly in Northern Virginia, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the world.

Following a 27-hour meeting in December, the Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted 4-3 in favor of the Digital Gateway complex, a campus composed of 37 data centers across 1,760 acres located between the Manassas National Battlefield Park and Conway Robinson State Forest.

Since June 2023, Amazon has acquired approval from the Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors on four proposed data center campuses spanning a total of 1,032 acres in the county. The global e-commerce titan also has plans to develop roughly 920 acres in Caroline County for data centers.

Groups like the Piedmont Environmental Council are alarmed by this proliferation that they say is occurring without adequate regulations and transparency to protect the land and other resources.

A trio of plaintiffs — the American Battlefield Trust, Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and Friends of Wilderness Battlefield — have filed a lawsuit against Orange County to shed some light on the “lack of consideration” involved in the Wilderness Crossing rezoning.

Mary Koik, a spokeswoman for the American Battlefield Trust, told The Daily Progress that the group plans to uncover information about tax breaks granted to the developer. The trust is also seeking clarity on the changes made to the project’s details after it was passed by the Orange County Planning Commission in March of last year before being approved by the board of supervisors a month later.

“With so much that was shrouded in secrecy throughout the process, it’s hard to say one way or the other what those changes might be,” Koik said. “But I think certainly having more information on the record about the proposal would help everyone evaluate with eyes wide open.”

The lawsuit could potentially overturn the rezoning vote and reopen the project for further deliberation, said Koik, which will “take into consideration the cumulative impact and other things coming to light as well.”

President of the American Battlefield Trust David Duncan went a step further in a statement his organization released in early December that announced the filing of the lawsuit, calling for the “full disclosure of the backroom deals that led to the approval of this project and accountability for those who made those deals.”

Johnson is confident that the board is “on the right side of the line” and that the court will not find any such dealings as it was a “straightforward rezoning.”

“I don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Johnson. “That language is intended to make it sound like something corrupt went on, but this was adopted in the bright light of day. I don’t know what they’re talking about with backroom deals. I guess some lawyer thought it sounded like a red flag.”

The lawsuit is currently in the discovery phase with no date set for a hearing, as the two sides continue to struggle for command of the Wilderness Battlefield.