The Civil War Trust is America’s largest non-profit organization (501-C3) devoted to the preservation of our nation’s endangered Civil War battlefields. The Trust also promotes educational programs and heritage tourism initiatives to inform the public of the war’s history and the fundamental conflicts that sparked it.
Preservation Revolution:
A Short History of the Civil War Trust
The Civil War Trust story began in 1987, when twenty or so stalwart souls met to discuss what could be done to protect the rapidly disappearing battlefields around them. Calling themselves the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites (APCWS), they were spurred to action watching the expanding suburbs of Washington, D.C. destroy Northern Virginia battlefields. The only way to save these sites for posterity, they decided, was to buy the physical landscapes themselves.
As word of efforts to protect these battlefields spread among the Civil War community, both membership and accomplishment lists began to grow steadily. In 1991, another national organization, the Civil War Trust (note: this predecessor organization now has the same name that we currently employ), appeared on the scene to further efforts to protect these vanishing historic landscapes. Eight years later, in an attempt to increase the efficiency with which preservation opportunities could be pursued, the two groups merged to become the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT), with Jim Lighthizer, a former Maryland Secretary of Transportation and pioneer in the use of Transportation Enhancement highway funds for historic landscape preservation, at the helm.
With a single organization combining the influence and resources of its two successful predecessors, a battlefield preservation revolution began. Since 1999, it was the number one entity saving battlefield land in America, protecting land at a rate four times that of the National Park Service. Among the Trust’s numerous successes was the protection of the Slaughter Pen Farm at Fredericksburg, the largest private battlefield protection effort in American history. In 2011, two decades into the modern preservation movement, the Civil War Trust had saved its milestone 30,000th acre, but much work remains to be done.
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