The western end of the envisioned theme park remains rural with a Boy Scout campground.
For much of the Disney fight, PEC’s fast-developing role was shouldered primarily by two young staff members, Chris Miller and Hilary Scheer, a 26-year-old reporter on the Fauquier Times Democrat who had grown up on a Fauquier County farm and worked tirelessly to present PEC’s views to the news media.
At the PEC, which was totally unprepared for the fight, money was always scarce and remained so throughout the Disney fight. Disney chairman Eisner’s portrait of himself as being up against Mellons, Duponts, and Harrimans, “some of the most powerful families in America” with matchless power “to lobby a cause with government” must have seemed amusing to young Miller and Scheer as they tried to counter a small army of Disney lawyers, political advisors, lobbyists, and public relations firms.
Major financial help for the PEC did come from two Dupont and three Mellon fortune heirs: Katherine Conover and Andrea and Lavinia Currier, two young sisters who had grown up in the Piedmont. As teenagers, the Currier sisters had carried petitions door-to-door to block construction of a Route 66 interchange in an area of sparsely populated farmland. But the largest single contributor to PEC’s Disney campaign was the Prince Charitable Trust, a Chicago–based foundation interested in land planning and conservation. Its tie to Virginia was foundation president Frederick R. Prince, who loved the Piedmont and had a vacation home there.
With Miller at the helm, PEC came of age during the battle with Disney. In the last 10 years, the organization has grown into the premier regional environmental group in the country, a model that others have come to study and emulate. Since Disney, its membership has soared from 1,000 to 5,000 and its budget and staff have quadrupled. With its 40 staff members working out of offices in nine Piedmont counties, the PEC has successfully taken on one major environmental and conservation issue after another.
In confronting virtually every new challenge, one or more PEC members have stepped forward at a critical moment to volunteer their special skills. In the current fight with Dominion Power, for example, PEC member Lynn Coleman, a senior partner at Skadden Arps, and one of the nation’s leading experts on energy regulation, has guided PEC through the maze of government energy laws and regulations. Coleman and his family came to Rappahannock County for its tranquility and beauty, but suddenly he’s becomes a full-time volunteer activist.
Fighting crises may be the most visible of the PEC’s activities since Disney, but equally or more important have been programs aimed at long-terms gains in conservation protection. The amount of land in Piedmont counties protected by scenic or conservation easements has quadrupled from 76,000 acres to nearly 300,000 acres—the single largest concentration of easement-protected land in the nation.
Experts such as Chris Miller, Bill Backer, and Lynn Coleman are needed, but the Disney battle and subsequent fights to stop illconceived highway expansions or power lines would have been lost without the skills and dedication of veteran community organizers. When Disney announced its plan, effective grassroots organizations were scarce in the region. The PEC had seldom needed to mobilize its members rapidly, and lacked the modern communication technology to do so quickly. The pioneering work of veteran organizers was critical. After years organizing her neighbors in Citizens for Fauquier County, Warrenton’s Hope Porter was ready for Disney. Years earlier she had stopped a 10,000-house development in the Fauquier countryside after discovering that the developer had made payments to local officials. With the Disney threat, Porter revved up her network. When Disney officials showed up for the world premiere of the “Lion King” at Washington’s Uptown Theater, dozens of protestors greeted them, waving signs mocking Disney’s beloved cartoon characters. Local puppet artists displayed effigies of “Mickey the Rat” and “the Lyin’ King.” Children chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Mickey Mouse has got to Go.” At an event at the National Zoo, Porter even managed to decorate Eisner’s limousine with a “Disney Take a Second Look” bumper sticker.
At the May 1994 Gold Cup before 50,000, just as Governor Allen dramatically arrived by helicopter, a small plane flew overhead pulling a banner saying: “Governor Allen, Don’t Sell Out Virginia.” The plane was guided in by Hope Porter, talking to the pilot by walkie-talkie.
In Prince William County, the late Annie Snyder already had organized against construction of a shopping center at the edge of the Manassas Battlefield. She quickly reenergized the Save the Battlefield Coalition to stop Disney from enacting ersatz Civil War history just four miles from the real battlefield. Working together, Porter and Snyder collected 40,000 names on a petition opposing Disney that they circulated to conservation groups, garden clubs, and civil war organizations throughout the nation. Others hastily organized Protect Prince William, given the county’s lack of effective organizations to even question, much less contest, 25 years of poorly planned but rampant development.
Stirred by the Disney fight, however, Prince William citizens and those throughout the Piedmont now meet in dozens of new grassroots groups, and coordinate their efforts through umbrella organizations such as “The Coalition for Smart Growth.” Chris Miller and 17 other leaders of the Virginia Conservation League come together in conference calls twice a week to compare notes and coordinate their actions on state policy issues. Today those issues range from maintaining a state moratorium on uranium mining to opposing builders’ efforts to reduce required fees for new development. The new activists back candidates at the local level through the Virginia League of Conservation Voters. In the summer of 1994, several thousand protestors from Prince William and the other Piedmont counties staged a “March on Washington,” which paraded past the White House, around the Capitol, and ended with a rally on the mall in front of the Washington Monument. Demonstrators carried protest signs, including ones saying “Disney Destroys Farm Land” as well as a cardboard coffin with the name “Michael Eisner” on it.” The motley collection who came to petition their national government included a cross-section of people from the Piedmont, among them farmers, school teachers, carpenters, lawyers, nurses, and airplane mechanics.
These grassroots efforts have paid dividends. The pro-development board in Prince William, which uncritically cheered on Disney, is gone, replaced with supervisors attentive to conservation supporters and often elected with their support. In Prince William alone, effective new citizen groups include Advocates for the Rural Crescent, the Rural Preservation Alliance, and the Prince William Conservation Alliance. Responding to citizen demands to protect open spaces and carefully plan growth, the board created an 80,000-acre rural crescent at the western end of the county to limit development there. In 2003, Prince William Board Chairman Sean Connaughton declared that the county was better off economically than it would have been with the Disney theme park. “We’re finally starting to break ourselves out of being completely dependent on a service economy and moving into the high-tech and bio-tech worlds,” he told The Washington Post. “I don’t think we ever would have done that if Disney became the driving force in the economy.”
In Fauquier County, the board of supervisors is actively promoting land conservation by spending county funds to buy “development rights” from farmers to help keep land in agriculture. Governor Tim Kaine also has pushed hard to protect more agricultural and forest land from development.
BY EARLY SPRING IN 1994, PEC and its allies had battled Disney for six months with mixed results. They had scrutinized and challenged Disney’s rezoning application with every available federal, state, and local requirement for zoning and environmental and conservation protection. Opponents had slowed the bandwagon, forcing Disney to revise, clarify, and refine the details of its proposal. Yet final approval by the Prince William government of the Disney project seemed inevitable. What loomed next was a drawn-out and costly legal fight that would end up in the courts with Disney the probable victor.
At this critical point, Fauquier resident Mary Lynn Kotz, an author and former magazine editor, fastened on what she had decided was the missing element in the Disney fight. None of Disney’s opponents had effectively publicized the most valuable and best-known resource in the Piedmont—its rich history! This history of the Founding Fathers and of the Civil War was a common heritage shared and valued not only by local residents—but by people throughout the nation.
Yet the Disney fight had been waged like any other conventional zoning dispute, pitting land conservationists and environmentalists against developers. That’s exactly how the local news media was portraying the story. If other Americans outside the region had a stake in the outcome of the Disney fight, no one had bothered to tell them.
On a misty spring night, four of us decided to put history on the front burner. Meeting in the parking lot behind the Fauquier Middle School on Waterloo Street in Warrenton after a public hearing on the county budget, Mary Lynn Kotz and I, and old friends Julian and Sue Scheer, talked about history—and decided to start a new front that became Protect Historic America. Its mission would be to engage the entire nation in the fight to protect the Piedmont. We would ask the country’s most distinguished historians and journalists to remind Americans everywhere that the Piedmont was not just our home, but was home to Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe and the scene of the most bloody fighting of the Civil War. The historians would argue that this “Hallowed Ground” with its dozens of battlefields and historic villages should not be despoiled by the collateral sprawl from a Disney theme park.
The next day, we created Protect Historic America with office space in the Kotzes’ downtown Washington office. I would direct the operation and Julian Scheer would act as liaison with the PEC. Mary Lynn and I brought to the organization lifetimes spent in journalism. Before becoming a public relations executive, Julian Scheer had served as public affairs director for NASA in its heyday. Sue Scheer was one of the region’s most effective conservation advocates. What we shared in common was life on Fauquier farms, membership in the PEC, and dedication to the Piedmont.
Within a month, we had recruited 200 of the nation’s historians and writers to serve on Protect Historic America’s national advisory board. We hired veteran journalist Bob Walters, followed by Rudy Abramson, to serve as executive director. Author David McCullough and civil war historian James McPherson agreed to serve as chairman and president of the advisory board. We introduced them and other board members at a press conference at the National Press Club, attended by reporters from the nation’s major newspapers and magazines, as well the television networks. The press conference was orchestrated by Peter Hannaford, former Reagan campaign manager and George Washington biographer who volunteered the professional services of his public relations agency. Among our new board members who spoke was Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who had just committed his organization to oppose Disney. Legal and political advice was volunteered pro bono by Harry McPherson, a Washington attorney and history buff who had earlier been counsel in the Lyndon Johnson White House.
In a matter of days, the dispute about Disney’s proposed history theme park had become national news.
The late C. Vann Woodward, dean of American historians and co-chairman of Protect Historic America, reduced the image of the Piedmont and its heritage to its essence. “This part of northern Virginia has soaked up more of the blood, sweat, and tears of American history than any other area of the country,” he wrote in The New Republic. ”It has bred more of the Founding Fathers, inspired more soaring hopes and ideals, witnessed more triumphs and failures, victories and lost causes than any other place in the country.”
What Woodward and the other historians feared is that Disney sprawl would engulf a region that still retained valuable parts of its history and character from the 18th and 19th centuries. David McCullough said that Thomas Jefferson could ride today from his home in Charlottesville to Washington and still recognize much of the open landscape and many historic buildings. The historians stressed that the proposed theme park would be located within less than an hour’s drive from the homes of four presidents, the 13 historic towns, 16 Civil War battlefields, and 17 historic districts.
Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, held a public hearing on the Disney plan with the Protect Historic America historians as the witnesses. Representative Mike Andrews of Texas sponsored a House resolution in opposition to Disney’s America. The object, of course, was to attract media attention and to keep a national spotlight on the issue.
Newspaper columnists, editorial writers and cartoonists joined the cause. The cartoonists had a field day wickedly lampooning Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters. In four months, the files of Protect Historic America accumulated 15,000 news articles, editorials, and cartoons, several of which portrayed a sad President Lincoln wearing a Mickey Mouse cap. Television coverage was vast, reaching even to Europe and Japan, whose networks sent reporters to cover the fight. Advisory board member W. Brown Morton III, of Waterford, was the historian guiding foreign media around the endangered battlefields.
Growing increasingly irritated by the mounting volume of criticism of the project generated by the Protect Historic America historians, Eisner publicly lost his temper. In a series of news interviews, he came across as thin-skinned and supremely arrogant. First, he told a CBS television news reporter that Virginians “should be so lucky as to have Orlando in Virginia.” Next, he told a group of Washington Post editors and reporters how, that instead of criticism, he had expected “to be taken around on people’s shoulders” in gratitude for bringing Disney to Virginia. He followed by deriding his historian critics: “I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff, and I didn’t learning anything. It was pretty boring.” Looking back, Eisner would lament how his intemperance had hurt his own cause.
In late September, Disney announced it was pulling out of the Piedmont. In the face of the new barrage of public criticism, Disney executives decided that even if they won approval for the theme park, it might become a Pyrrhic victory. Having suffered from the lampooning of its treasured trademark symbols, Disney decided not to risk the danger that the project would cause serious, perhaps permanent, damage to the company’s reputation.
In the Piedmont today, there is a new pride in its place in the nation’s history. Fauquier resident Janet Whitehouse led the effort that created the Mosby Heritage Area, an educational program to provide greater identity to and awareness of the cultural and historic resources of the most northern part of the Virginia Piedmont. Local governments, led by Fauquier County, are commissioning studies of their counties’ history and adding more sites to the National Register of Historic Places. Protect Historic America executive director Rudy Abramson celebrated the history of the region and efforts to preserve it in Hallowed Ground: Preserving America’s Heritage. A new organization, Journey Through Hallowed Ground, is working to imprint the region’s historic identity along the route from Charlottesville to Gettysburg.
“The most significant effect of the Disney fight,” said PEC President Chris Miller, “is that it told people that they could fight back—and win!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kotz has lived and farmed near Thoroughfare Gap for over 30 years. His most recent book is Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Kotz dedicates this story to the memory of the late Rudy Abramson, executive director of Protect Historic America and a loyal friend of the Piedmont.
