"PART of this position," former
Alas, Mr. Rolfe will have lots of time to go fishing: The board, meeting Friday night in special session, fired him on a 3-2 vote. Evidently, some board members--most of whom favor allowing the Wal-Mart Supercenter (and associated big boxes) on land near the Wilderness component of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park--suffered red faces and quiv- ering wattles when the contents of Mr. Rolfe's e-mail became front-page news in The Free Lance-Star. A couple of board members reportedly critical of Mr. Rolfe's overall performance seized upon the Wal-Mart memo as evidence that a loose cannon was rolling around Orange. Truth and justice have had better days, but the cold fact is that a county administrator serves "at the pleasure of the board," and Mr. Rolfe failed to keep his bosses pleased.
Keeping one's honor clean, as the Marines sing, is not always easy, but Mr. Rolfe leaves the service of Orange County with his spotless. He worked hard for two years to clear the bureaucratic thicket for Wal-Mart, but then its location--at one point only a quarter-mile from the national battlefield park and smack-dab in non-park land where the warring armies operated--became a national issue. Historians signed petitions. Out-of-state legislators whose constituents' ancestors fought in the Wilderness raised a hue and cry. Actor Robert Duvall (a descendent of Robert E. Lee, whom Mr. Duvall portrayed in the movie "Gods and Generals") declaimed. A thoughtful person at this point asks, "Might these plaintiffs have a point?"
Mr. Rolfe is a thoughtful person, the more so after he read commentaries in our June 14 Viewpoints section written by three local residents involved in the successful effort, in the 1990s, to dissuade Wal-Mart from building a store near George Washington's boyhood home in Stafford County. The "Ferry Farm Wal-Mart" opened a seemly piece from young George's home place, and Stafford County still got the tax revenues it craved. In his e-mail, Mr. Rolfe wondered why not do that here, garnering the same tax receipts while also protecting the battlefield, a separate county resource that pays dividends in tourism? He pointed to another Orange property of 900 acres whose owners are champing at the bit to host development.
SCORNED PROPHET
But a prophet--or maybe just anyone with an ounce of smarts or a gram of foresight--is, it seems, without honor in certain precincts of Orange County. Sometimes he's even without a job.
Of all the 384 major armed conflicts of the War Between the States, the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission--created by Congress to help rescue "the nation's Civil War heritage" from the "grave danger" of its disappearance "under buildings, parking lots, and highways"--ranked just 45 as "having a decisive influence on a campaign and a direct impact on the course of the war." The Wilderness is one of them. Among such "Class A" Civil War battlefields at national parks, the Wilderness was one of 10 at which the commission put the threat level from development as "high." Higher now, surely, than then.
The Battle of the Wilderness, writes Virginia Department of Historic Resources Director Kathleen Kilpatrick, spelled the beginning of the end for the Confederacy by putting Lee permanently on the defensive. The whole "study area" of operations, into which a Supercenter and its retail retinue would crash like asteroids, is preservation-worthy, says Ms. Kilpatrick, because its "roadways along which troop movements occurred, terrain and land forms, and waterways and fords" help tell the battlefield's story. Further, "the preponderance of evidence indicates that this [Wal-Mart] parcel figured directly in military operations of the Confederate Army during the Battle of Chancellorsville and of the Union Army during the Battle of the Wilderness."
Why would Orange supervisors not prefer a better Wal-Mart site? People they can't fire are asking that question.