Why Camp Allegheny Matters

I've spent most of the past three months working to bring the historical, archaeological and physical facts about Camp Allegheny Battlefield to the attention of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and the Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC). I’ve enlisted letter writers from across West Virginia and the nation to educate Virginia officials regarding the location, significance, and rare beauty of this hallowed ground.

Needless to say, this is not what I planned on doing this Fall.

I’m not a Civil War historian, archaeologist, or preservationist. I’m not an activist. But desperate times, as the saying goes, call for desperate measures. And when I found out, quite by accident, that a Virginia wind developer had received SCC approval to erect 400-foot-tall, nearly 300-foot-wide wind turbines adjacent to Camp Allegheny, I was compelled to do something about it.

How could Virginia approve an industrial development adjacent to a site listed on the National Register of Historic Places without a federal review process or any public input?

After years working in regulatory compliance, I knew that what was happening on the border of West Virginia and Virginia amounted to a denial of the regulatory process. A miscarriage of justice with implications far beyond Pocahontas and Highland counties.

National Register sites belong to the citizens of the nation. We grant certain special places this status because we agree that there is something about them that’s worth protecting and preserving. If elected and appointed government officials can simply withdraw such protection behind our backs—without citizen input—then, as a practical matter, no place is sacred. Every place is open for business.

This is wrong.

We, all of us, know in our hearts that some places have value far greater than whatever short term profit might be extracted from them through their destruction.

We, all of us, know in our hearts that some places transcend the limits of a single human life and in so doing connect us to history, to the flesh-and-blood lives of those to whom we owe our own.

Camp Allegheny Battlefield is such a place.

A place where one can stand in the wind-swept, empty silence, look out on row after row of mountain ridges and travel through time. Buffalo herds and Indian camp fires. Infant deaths and church socials. Musket blast and bugle call. Scythes and axes and train whistles. Cries of grief and shouts of laughter. Young Yeagers and Varners and Confederate soldiers playing together in the December snow.

The past is present here, and much more real than in any museum.

Camp Allegheny matters because all such places matter.

If the people don’t have a voice in saving Camp Allegheny, then all our sacred places are at risk.

A nation without such places is a nation lost.