Kathy Stewart, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – You can think of it as spring cleaning but for Civil War battlefields. All across the country and here in our region, volunteers were heading out to clean up local battlefields and historic sites on Saturday.
This was the 15th year for Park Day. It is a nationwide, hands-on preservation and cleaning event put on by the Civil War Trust, the biggest non-profit battlefield preservation organization in the U.S.
Volunteers do everything from raking leaves and hauling trash to cleaning up roadside.
At the Wilderness Battlefield in Orange County near Spotsylvania, volunteers and history buffs cleaned up this hallowed ground and removed trash from Route 20, which runs through the site.
“There is all kinds of trash collected from the road — car parts, bumpers, tires, papers. You name it.” says Mark Wademan with Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield.
Wademan says the National Park Service just doesn’t have enough people to keep up because this is a full-time job.
“There are four battlefields in this area,” he says. “You have Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Spotsylvania Court House and the Wilderness Battlefield.”
This is the third year that 7-year-old Amara Roland, her younger sister and their parents volunteered.
“We are helping the park service clean up the national parks so when people visit it looks better,” she says.
But this was the first time Chris Peal came out. A month ago she moved from upstate New York and now lives across from the battlefield. She says it is an “emotional” experience to think about how many men died here during the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864.
It was the very first time Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first clashed. Although the battle only lasted days, the fighting left tens of thousands dead, wounded or missing.
This clean up is a tribute to the fallen Wademan says.
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