History News Network : posted on Saturday, January 3, 2009
Historians protest Wal-Mart near Civil War
battlefield<http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/59184.html>

Source: *AP*<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/02/historians-battle-walmart_n_154920.html>(1-2-09)

LOCUST GROVE, Va. —- Wal-Mart wants to build a Supercenter within a
cannonshot of where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first fought, a
proposal that has preservationists rallying to protect the key Civil War
site.

A who's who of historians including filmmaker Ken Burns and Pulitzer Prize
winner David McCullough sent a letter last month to H. Lee Scott, president
and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., urging the company to build somewhere
farther from the Wilderness Battlefield.

"The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground
hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved," said
the letter from 253 scholars and others.

Wal-Mart and its supporters point out that the 138,000-square-foot store
would be right behind a bank and a small strip mall, a full mile from
entrance to the site of the 1864 clash that left thousands dead and hastened
the war's end...

Grant's Union troops were headed to Richmond on May 4, 1864, when they
confronted Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The Battle of the
Wilderness involved more than 100,000 Union troops and 61,000 Confederates.
The fighting, according to National Park Service estimates, left more than
4,000 dead and 20,000 wounded.

-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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