Committee supports tree-planting plan along Journey

The Journey Through Hallowed Ground wants to lay down roots — lots of them — in its remembrance of the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War.

Starting next year through 2015, the Waterford-based history organization will set out to plant 620,000 trees — about one for each soldier who died in the war — along the 180-mile route from Monticello to Gettysburg, Pa.

The National Heritage Area and national scenic byway on which JTHG focuses its preservation efforts has the country’s largest concentration of Civil War battlefields. Several along the historic corridor are in Culpeper, including Brandy Station, Cedar Mountain and Kelly’s Ford.

A Culpeper Town Council committee endorsed the tree-planting plan at a meeting last week, and the green idea also previously gained support from the board of supervisors in Culpeper, Fauquier, Albemarle and Spotsylvania counties.

“Our aim is to plant one tree for each of the fallen,” Cate Magennis Wyatt, JTHG president, told the town council committee at its recent meeting. “I don’t know that it can be done, but it is an eloquent idea in theory and practice.”

To accomplish the goal, a whopping 3,444 trees would be planted along every mile of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, generally following U.S. 15.

Culpeper County’s portion of the Journey spans some 21 miles, so that means this area alone could see more than 72,000 trees planted, per the organization’s plan.

Wyatt told the council committee the legacy project would not impose a cost on localities. She said the American Chestnut Organization Virginia Chapter had already offered to donate 100,000 trees.

The committee unanimously adopted a town-developed resolution in support of the tree initiative. Councilman Jim Risner wanted one change, however, to the last sentence of the resolution, which states, “the JTHG will plant one tree for each citizen who sacrificed his life to create this union.”

The Confederates, of course, broke from the union in fighting the war.

“This was a war that was very divisive,” Risner said. “It was a trying time in our history, but we got over it and we continue to get over it; planting trees is a good way to do that.”

The committee agreed to strike the sentence in question from the resolution. Town council will consider the initiative at its regular meeting Sept. 14.

In a follow-up conversation, Wyatt said the idea was to plant rows of trees as if to mimic a battalion, thus creating powerful imagery reminding people of the sacrifices made along the Journey. “We want people to recognize the trees as a life that was lost,” she said.

In a related matter, Wyatt noted the United Nations had designated 2011 as The International Year of Forests.