RICHMOND(AP) _ Orange County officials asked a judge today to dismiss an attempt to block Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a Supercenter near an endangered Civil War battlefield.
The filing by the Board of Supervisors contends preservationists and residents who filed the legal challenge have no standing in the issue and defended the county’s Aug. 25 vote approving the store near the Wilderness Battlefield.
“Plaintiffs want to prevent use of land that they do not own, and this suit is a contrived effort to enable them to do so,” the county filing states.
A judge had not scheduled a hearing on the motion, a court clerk said.
Preservationists have opposed Walmart’s plans to build less than one half-mile from the Locust Grove battlefield where 30,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were injured or killed 145 years ago.
They contend supervisors brushed aside concerns about the negative impact the store would have on the battlefield and approved the special use permit Wal-Mart needed to build the big box store.
The retailer described the preservationists’ legal challenge as having “no merit or basis in fact.”
It was filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Friends of Wilderness Battlefield and six residents of Orange and Spotsylvania counties. They did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
Their challenge asked a judge to declare supervisors’ vote “unlawful and invalid” and to block any further county action on Walmart’s site plan. Construction has not begun at the site about 50 miles southwest of Washington, D.C.
The planned store generated a national effort by Civil War buffs and historians to block its construction. More than 250 historians, including Pulitzer Prize historian James McPherson, added their names to a petition opposing it.
The Wilderness Battlefield is where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first met in a battle considered a turning point in the war.
Residents and supervisors who supported the store said it would not diminish an area that already has two strip malls. They welcomed the hundreds of jobs it would bring to the rural community, the shopping option and the estimated 800,000 annually in tax revenue for the county of approximately 32,000.
Wal-Mart argued that the site is zoned for commercial use and the store will not be within sight of the battlefield’s 2,700 protected acres.