Category Archives: Property rights

Manassas Battlefield Park Superintendent Ed Clark stands by a federal cannon with a statute of Stonewall Jackson in the background.

The Manassas Battlefield has become the scene of yet another irreconcilable conflict: this one between VDOT’s road-building plans, park service preservation goals and local residents protecting their way of life.

by James A. Bacon

As superintendent of the Manassas National Battlefield Park, Ed Clark enjoys regaling visitors with stories about the colorful characters who took part in two of the most important battles of the Civil War. But the administrative aspects of his job require most of his attention. Clark oversees the restoration of historical structures in the park and the updating of exhibits. He directs the plan for restoring the landscape to its 1862 form, which means cutting down some of the woods that have grown up since then, replacing invasive trees with native species, and doing something about those confounded deer. He keeps careful tabs on the private property inside the park and on its periphery. He would love to buy out the handful of property owners who still live within the official park boundaries, and he dreams of acquiring select properties outside the boundaries.

But Clark’s biggest preoccupation these days is traffic… rush hour traffic. The theme that animates his thoughts is how to improve the experience of the roughly 600,000 people who visit the park each year. And traffic congestion, he says, is ruining that experience.

About 24,000 vehicles per day use two two-lane roads — U.S. 29 (Lee Highway) and Rt. 234 (Sudley Road) — that intersect in the heart of the battlefield park. The two roads are direct descendants of the old Warrenton Turnpike and a local dirt road that played key roles during the battles. Clark knows they can’t be restored to their primitive, 19th-century condition but he’s not happy with the way they have been co-opted as regional transportation arteries serving the development sprouting all around in western Prince William County.

For three to four hours each morning and then each evening, traffic stacks up at the intersection near the old Stone House, one of the most visible battlefield landmarks. The driving tour, which many people take because the distances are too far flung to walk within the seven-square-mile park, requires crossing that intersection eight times. “The traffic detracts from the visitor experience,” says Clark. “Basically, it shuts down the park to visitors.”

The superintendent now finds himself embroiled in a political slugfest worthy of the artillery duel where General Thomas J. Jackson was said to stand as steadfast as a stone wall. But the 21st-century conflict is more complex and more drawn out. Manassas Battlefield sits athwart the route of a four- to six-lane highway that the McDonnell administration wants to run from the City of Manassas past Dulles airport. Local landowners, smart growth groups and even many local Republican legislators don’t want to see this rural corner of Northern Virginia developed.

Clark says he is doing his best to reconcile the park service’s preservation goals with McDonnell administration transportation policy, all the while respecting the rights of local landowners. He is negotiating a “programmatic agreement” with the Virginia Department of Transportation that would allow the state to run a major north-south highway past the western edge of the park, sharing alignment with a portion of a planned battlefield bypass that will loop around the northern periphery. In exchange, the park service would get to close the north-south segment of Rt. 234 inside the park and, when the bypass is complete sometime in the indefinite future, close the east-west segment of Rt. 29.

“We’re at the end game of a lot of conversations,” he says. Now the negotiations have boiled down to minimizing the footprint of the highway and mitigating its noise and visual impact.

But Clark may not be as close to the end game as he thinks. Only recently have citizens gotten wind of the details of the draft programmatic agreement, and they’re fired up.

“We feel like sacrificial lambs. Our way of life, our quality of life, our ability to live here” are all threatened,” says Page Snyder, daughter of the legendary Annie Snyder, who successfully spear-headed resistance to a regional mega-mall next to the battlefield park in 1988 and a Disney theme park five years later.

Snyder is one of roughly 100 property owners along Pageland Lane who will be directly affected by the agreement. But neither she nor they act like lambs being led to slaughter. Local foes of the proposed plan have packed public gatherings by the hundreds, joined forces with Smart Growth groups, recruited six Republican General Assembly members and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-10th, to their side, extracted a promise from the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) to delay accepting a Master Plan for the proposed North-South Corridor of Statewide Significance, and persuaded the Prince William board to delay a vote affirming its support for the Bi-County Parkway, the linchpin of the North-South Corridor.

The outcome appears very much up in the air. Read more.

Rob Hodge, Civil War re-enactor and documentary film maker, says the rush hour traffic at the intersection of U.S. 29 and Rt. 234 harms the visitor experience at the Manassas Battlefield.