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Historians, developer, county team up to honor Yankee soldiers who made eastern Stafford their home away from home Date published: 8/2/2005
By CLINT SCHEMMER It seems the unlikeliest of alliances: The developer whose contractor bulldozed a Civil War fort in Stafford County joining forces with the preservationists who practically wept over the earthworks' destruction. But that's just what is happening in the hilly woods near Aquia Landing in eastern Stafford. Stafford's Aquia District supervisor, in concert with a new citizens group, Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites, has persuaded SYG Associates Inc. of Warrenton to commemorate the obliterated fort. SYG has also sponsored documentation and excavation of the nearby site of a Union Army winter encampment, and will erect historical markers at both. The nonprofit group, which includes a few dozen members at this early stage, formed in reaction to the demise of the large earthworks, named Redoubt No. 3 by Union officers, in February. Initially, an attorney for SYG questioned whether the flat area left after a contractor cleared some trees really was a redoubt--to the angry astonishment of local historians who had seen and photographed its rectangular 70-feet-long, 12-feet-high earthen walls. But later, after John McBride of the Manassas law firm of Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian investigated further and spoke with SYG's president, veteran builder Jimmy Ghadban, he changed his mind. And once McBride had paid a couple of visits to the White Oak Civil War Museum in southern Stafford and talked with its founder, D.P. Newton, and another historian, Glenn Trimmer, he brokered an agreement between his client and the historians. Newton and Trimmer suggested marking the fort's site with a permanent monument and preserving another Civil War site on a nearby SYG tract. Tonight, at Supervisor Kandy Hilliard's invitation and with Ghadban present, Newton and Trimmer will brief the Stafford Board of Supervisors on the first fruits of that partnership. They will outline a new public-private strategy that could document Stafford's fast-disappearing Civil War sites, help preserve those places, better inform the public of their existence, and perhaps save developers some money while doing it. "It's unfortunate everything was triggered by Redoubt No. 3, because if [Ghadban] had known earlier, he would have been doing this anyway," McBride said, describing his client as someone who "has a sense of history."
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