Holding Their Ground
As development devours land from Virginia’s Piedmont to Gettysburg, a new coalition rises in opposition.
BY MARC LEEPSON
Nearly a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln
delivered his famous address at Gettysburg—where
the Civil War's decisive battle raged for three
days—the countryside around this southern Pennsylvania
town seems to have reached its own crossroads. As
the pressure to develop the land surrounding Gettysburg
in Adams County intensifies, the area is steadily,
and worrisomely, turning
suburban. The sizable belt of apple, pear, and peach
orchards, for example, has been giving way to subdivision
after subdivision as some 11,000 acres of farmland
have been developed in the last decade. The county's
population increased by nearly 27 percent from 1990
to 2004. The trend shows no signs of diminishing.
"We're becoming a suburb of Washington and
Baltimore," says Alice Estrada, the executive
director of Main Street Gettysburg. "It's
very easy to develop here because we are townships,
many of which don't have very sophisticated comprehensive
plans. And they don't update them. Township meetings
are often packed with residents, but they're
helpless to fight sprawl because the plans allow this
kind of thing." Plus, Estrada says, "the
land is relatively cheap compared to that in nearby
Maryland, and our farmers aren't prospering.
It's a very serious issue."
Gettysburg is hardly alone. As this terrain loses
its rural character, so does much of a broad stretch
of the mid-Atlantic region that runs south from here
along a 175-mile corridor all the way to Charlottesville,
Va. Paralleling the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge
and Catoctin mountains, this band of Piedmont counties
takes in an unmatched collection of historic, cultural,
recreational, and scenic treasures. Its focus is the
historic Old Carolina Road, a passage that began as
an Indian trail called the Great Warriors Path and
later served, from colonial days into the automobile
age, as one of the nation's main north-south
roads. Today it is heavily traveled U.S. Route 15,
from Gettysburg to Orange in central Virginia, where
it continues as Virginia Route 20 to Thomas Jefferson's
Monticello near Charlottesville.
Most of this corridor, especially the northern two-thirds,
sits in the far shadow of the Baltimore-Washington,
D.C., metropolitan area, where development has increased
drastically over the years. Subdivisions, shopping
malls, and commercial strips have crept ever westward
from the two big cities and expanded outward
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