Keeping the Piedmont Battlefield Farmland Forever: A 2023 Battlefield Grant

The grant

The grant supports the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation in keeping the Piedmont Battlefield rural, by placing a historic conservation easement on farmland where fighting took place on June 5, 1864. An easement lets farmers keep farming while protecting the land forever, by limiting future development and subdivision. Here, part of the farmland will also be opened to the public, with interpretive markers.

The battle

While the great armies to the east closed in on Petersburg, the war in the Shenandoah Valley was fought on a smaller scale but with a sharper edge. Called the "breadbasket of the Confederacy," the valley in northwestern Virginia fed the South throughout the war — which made it a target for the Union army of Major General David Hunter in 1864.

• Hunter's troops lived off the land and used scorched-earth tactics as they moved up the valley.
• On June 5, they met a Confederate force near Piedmont, a small rural community northeast of present-day Staunton, Virginia.
• With stronger artillery, the Union troops overwhelmed the Confederates along a bend in the Middle River, taking more than 1,000 prisoners.
• Having destroyed the last major Confederate force before Lexington, the Union army marched on the Virginia Military Institute and burned it on June 11.

About the program

Battlefield Land Acquisition Grants from the American Battlefield Protection Program help preservation partners across the country buy and protect threatened battlefields of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The program also runs Preservation Planning Grants, open to any site of armed conflict on American soil, and the newer Battlefield Restoration and Battlefield Interpretation grants — support that builds community-led stewardship at the state, tribal and local levels.

Sources

Based on "Forever farmland at the Battle of Piedmont," American Battlefield Protection Program, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.