Angle at Gettysburg is inextricable from an
awareness of the mighty rebellion that reached that far and no farther.

Most major historic sites and shrines in the Basin have received
protection of one sort or another. The core portions of the great Civil
War battlegrounds are owned and maintained by the National Park
Service, as are Wakefield and Harpers Ferry and the C. & O. Canal and
other such places. States, municipalities, organizations, and
individuals have saved many others from destruction and decay and
sometimes have built them back to what they were--Mount Vernon,
Stratford, Gunston Hall, Fort Frederick and one or two of the smaller
bastions that George Washington helped to set up against the Indians in
the western Basin, and scores of other mansions and cabins and patches
of historic soil.

There is still a wide sense of the past's weight among a population of
whom many were born where they live and intend to die, and whose
ancestors did so too. This sense is shared by many other people who move
to the region, and in a few spots--mainly again in Virginia--it has led
to a degree of protection for the appearance of whole towns or historic
districts, as in Loudoun County with its admirable scenic regulations.
Under the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, states are conducting
surveys of such assets and studying means of encouraging their
preservation. But funds are still short even for the Federal part of the
program, and thus only individuals or accidents are still partially
guarding some fine old places--Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for
instance, or in Maryland the towns of Sharpsburg, Middletown, and
Burkittsville--against adornment with chrome and neon and fake-stone
veneer. Even in these places, some changes for the worse are taking
place.

Troubles and threats

All these things, then, are a part of what the Potomac Basin has to
offer in the way of environmental blessings. They form an endowment of
national value and importance, and a detailed examination of them would
take up more space than we can give them here, though some will come in
for more discussion later in this report and others are examined in the
corollary report of the Recreation and Landscape Sub-Task Force.

Some of them are in trouble now, and nearly all are faced with trouble
as bad or worse if the forces of change are allowed to move as blindly
and hoggishly forward as they have been moving during the decades behind
us, ever fast