"We're working on a set of scenarios," he said. "We're very early in the planning stages."
Preservationists say the structure would dominate the view from Gen. Robert E. Lee's headquarters and the Bell, Piper and Reel farms, which are situated around the battlefield. Lighthizer, a former Anne Arundel County executive and state transportation secretary, vowed to fight the proposal "until hell freezes over."
"When you put up a monstrosity of a cell tower," he said, "you really desecrate the visual environment."
At Monocacy, the trust says, the 150-foot-tall smokestack from the proposed trash-to-energy plant would be visible from much of the battlefield.
The Frederick County Board of Commissioners has not yet decided to build the plant. Michael G. Marschner, director of the Frederick County division of utilities and solid waste management, says several sites are under consideration, but the one in question, in an industrial park next to an existing wastewater treatment plant, has the advantage of already being owned by the county. Marschner says a smokestack from a cement kiln and a Toys R Us warehouse already are visible from the battlefield.
Lighthizer warned that the nation is losing a sense of itself. He compared contemporary knowledge of Pickett's Charge, the relatively well-known Confederate attack during the Battle of Gettysburg that resulted in heavy losses, with a similar charge during the Second Battle of Franklin, Tenn., that was perhaps twice as large and twice as bloody but is now largely forgotten.
"What's the one variable that's different?" Lighthizer asked. "Around the turn of the 20th century, we paved over Franklin."
Joining the preservationists in Washington was country singer-songwriter Trace Adkins. When he was 13, he said, his grandfather told him about his grandfather, a private in the 31st Louisiana Infantry who was wounded and captured at Vicksburg, Miss.
Adkins described his first visit to the Civil War battlefield, where a monument marks the spot where the 31st Louisiana was deployed.
"You can look across that battlefield and it's been preserved, it's one of the success stories, it still looks the way it looks when my great-great-grandfather was there," he said. "And I can't explain to you what a spiritual moment it was for me. Just to stand there and know I was within 100 feet of where he had been, and seeing the exact thing he was seeing."
matthew.brown@baltsun.com
