Orange Walmart decision looms

LOCUST GROVE — Wal-Mart’s plan to build a Supercenter in the shadow of one of the nation’s most important Civil War sites has been reduced to one question: How do you define a battlefield?

For the world’s biggest retailer, the answer is simple and it does not include the 55 acres near the Wilderness Battlefield where it plans to build a 138,000-square-foot store.
For preservationists, however, a battlefield encompasses more than the epicenter of fighting, and they contend if Wal-Mart’s big box store is built, it will smudge a window into the nation’s past.

Orange County supervisors will decide which history lesson to believe Monday, when they are expected to vote on the store after a public hearing. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the auditorium of Orange County High School.
If the hearing goes late, though, a vote could be pushed back to Tuesday.
“I don’t think anyone wants to extend this any more than it needs to be,” said District 2 Supervisor Zack Burkett.
He said he expects about 60 speakers.
“I’d like a repeat of [Thursday] night,” he said, referring to Thursday’s Planning Commission hearing, during which 33 people spoke. That hearing lasted less than two hours before commissioners began debating whether to vote. An earlier public hearing had 80 speakers.

The commission, minus two members, did vote, splitting 4-4 on a request to grant a special-use permit for the store, which amounts to a recommendation against the permit. The group had earlier approved the application on a 5-4 vote, but that vote was vacated when it was discovered that the meeting was held without proper public notice. Its recommendations, though, are nonbinding, so the latest vote was not a deal-killer. The Board of Supervisors has the power to grant or deny such permits.
No one disagrees that the Wilderness Battlefield was a pivotal and bloody epic in the Civil War. It was the first time Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met in battle, leading 160,000 Union and Confederate soldiers and leaving an estimated 29,000 either killed or wounded in the fighting 145 years ago.
Preservationists contend the store would be perilously close to the core battlefield and would encourage more commerce and traffic. They also argue that the store would be well within a cultural landscape of the battlefield — areas where troops deployed and maneuvered, for example.
While the store would not be within the 2,773 protected acres of the Wilderness, a 1993 congressional study defined the Walmart site as part of the historic dimensions of the battlefield.
It’s at that juncture where Wal-Mart and historians most sharply clash — the retailer contending the definition of the battlefield is so broad as to be meaningless, while opponents contending the store would be a permanent blight on future interpretations of the Wilderness battle.
“What Wal-Mart is proposing would absolutely transform the landscape,” said Jim Campi of the Civil War Preservation Trust. “Wal-Mart is proposing a superstore closer to a national park boundary than any previous Walmart, and this is right on the boundary of the national park.”

Wal-Mart has stressed that the store would be one-half mile from the entrance of the Wilderness Battlefield, and that its store will not be visible to visitors to the park.
Besides, the company said, the site is already commercially zoned and would be located near an intersection with two strip malls and 20 small retailers.
“We didn’t just settle on this site because there was nothing better,” said Keith Morris, a spokesman for Wal-Mart. “This is an A-plus commercial location in any community.”
Burkett, who is among the suspected majority on the board who favors the store, buys Wal-Mart’s arguments and said the alternative could be worse.
“If some guy wants to come in and put in a 59,000-square-foot porno shop, there’s nothing in our ordinances that let’s us stop that,” he said. “I think this will be an attractive development.”
In a moribund economy, Wal-Mart has attempted to counter a who’s who of historians opposed to the store’s location by emphasizing the jobs and tax revenues the Supercenter would deliver to the rural county of 32,000. The store would employ 300 and generate $800,000 a year in tax revenue, the company estimates.

But Al Norman, whose successful battle against a Walmart in Greenfield, Mass., nearly 20 years ago turned into a lifetime of activism against the retailer, said the economic benefits would be achieved at the expense of local, small businesses.
“It’s like a bullet aimed right at the existing merchants,” said Norman, who documents his anti-Wal-Mart efforts on Sprawl-Busters.com. “Economic illiteracy is Wal-Mart’s greatest hope. It’s what drives Wal-Mart’s success.”
More than 250 historians have urged Wal-Mart to move the store to another location in Orange County. The actor Robert Duvall, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and congressmen from states that lost many soldiers at the Wilderness — Texas and Vermont — have all suggested the same.

Wal-Mart has said there is no other suitable site in Orange County, but Morris declined to state whether the retailer would walk away if its preferred site was rejected. “I don’t want to frame that as a threat,” he said.
Rob Nieweg of the National Trust for Historic Preservation remains hopeful.
“Preservationists are dyed-in-the-wool optimists,” he said. “We think until Wal-Mart puts a shovel in the ground and begins to excavate, we will hold out hope this store can move up the road rather than be entrenched in the battlefield.”