Saltville battlefields gain state recognition

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Saltville Battlefields Historic District continues to make history with its inclusion on the Virginia Landmarks Register, official Dec. 17.
Saltville Director of Tourism Charlie Bill Totten said Monday he received confirmation of the state listing from David Lewis of the William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research.
“What a nice Christmas present for Saltville,” Totten said Lewis wrote.
Lewis was retained to file the paperwork required for the listing by Dr. Robert Whisonant, the Radford University geology professor who has led projects to map the Saltville battlefields, and RU anthropologist, archaeologist and professor Dr. Cliff Boyd.
Whisonant and Boyd – whom Totten called the Radford Team—mapped Saltville’s battlefields in a project to protect its extensive and unique Civil War resources and gave town officials final copies of the resulting preservation plan in September. Copies are maintained at the town hall and the Museum of the Middle Appalachians.
It’s a document that “opens one’s mind to possibilities never thought of before,” Totten said.
“The plan is a guide to making future decisions about what you’re going to do with the resources you have,” Whisonant said. Among possible actions the town might take, Whisonant listed conservation easements and acquisition of more battlefield land.
The town is working toward those goals, Totten said, through efforts to add earthen forts and other sites to town property and urging landowners to build long-term protection into private plans for other sites.
But there’s a pot of tourism gold sitting on property the town already owns, according to Totten. One of the plan’s recommendations blends the North Fork of the Holston River’s proximity to Civil War resources, prime bass fishing in its waters, and picnic spots on its banks, multiple activities in one place.
The national listing is among 104 additions for Virginia contributing to state’s standing as first among the 50 states and territories for locations added to NRHP in fiscal year 2009, according to Gov. Tim Kaine’s office.
If the state listing is a Christmas present, the town of Saltville could now receive a nice gift around Valentine’s Day. It is possible that a listing of the battlefields district now pending on the National Register of Historic Places couple be finalized by mid-February, according to Whisonant.
Boyd said in September they are “going for national level recognition. I think we have a good chance of that.”
Whisonant said the significance of the town’s Civil War resources merit awareness of them at the national level. In November 2006, he told a gathering of local historians, re-enactors, Museum of the Middle Appalachians board members and others that the Confederate earthworks on hills surrounding the vital salt wells and evaporation furnaces is a defensive system important enough to the understanding the area’s military actions to deserve national status.
The Saltville battle sites are made more important to preservationists because they and the town are one and the same. Many Civil War battlefields across the country are on farmland or the outskirts of towns where sprawl is expanding urban areas and destroying an acre of battlefield every 10 minutes, Whisonant said.
The old fortifications, like Hatton and Walnut Street on hills north of the well fields, and Breckenridge and Statham to the south, as well as the Broady Bottom and Sanders Hill, Cedar Creek and Elizabeth Cemetery, fall into Whisonant’s core areas and study areas.
The governor’s office said this is the fifth consecutive year in which Virginia has achieved top ranking for districts listed.
“It’s clear that historic preservation is an economic driver and revitalization tool,” Kaine said in a release. “Listing of historic districts and properties on the state and National Registers promotes the rehabilitation of neighborhoods and enhances community pride.”
In 2009, Virginia added 30 historic districts and 74 individual properties to its thousands of previously listed places on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register, the release said.
Virginia also ranked second in the nation in 2009 for the number of individual properties listed on the National Register, according to the National Park Service, the release said. The National Register program is managed in Virginia by the Department of Historic Resources, in partnership with property owners and local communities.
These register listings represent the broad range of Virginia’s rich and diverse historic legacy, and include places that recall the commonwealth’s colonial, agricultural and manufacturing past, its Native American and African American history, and its commercial, urban and suburban growth from the late 19th through the mid-20th century, the release said. 
“These rankings reflect the keen interest of Virginia’s citizens in historic preservation. Virginia property owners and communities continue to lead the nation in seeking formal recognition of our historic neighborhoods, and putting Virginia’s history to work,” said Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
Kilpatrick noted that Virginia has consistently ranked among the top states in listing historic properties for many consecutive years. “We have been #1 nationally since 2005 through 2009, with no fewer than 28 and no more than 30 historic districts. These numbers are a testament to the power of preservation to foster prosperity through historic rehabilitations.”
A National Register listing allows property owners to pursue federal rehabilitation tax credits to restore older buildings for income-producing uses. When paired with state rehabilitation tax credits, which can be more broadly applied to non-income producing properties, property owners may be eligible to receive a 45 percent return on eligible expenses for the one-time cost of rehabilitating a historic property.
The other inclusion from Saltville, the town’s historic district, was added to the Virginia register in September 2000 and the national list in 2002.

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