The 175-mile road trip between Gettysburg and Monticello is a sometimes traffic-clogged passage past flag-waving outlet malls and fast-emerging suburban outposts built to serve the Washington region’s booming population.
But a journey through the lands near Route 15 also takes in six presidential homes, including James Madison’s Montpelier, a concentration of Civil War battlefields from Antietam to Manassas, a million acres on the national historic register and the rolling Piedmont scenery that inspired the Founding Fathers.
Yesterday, Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, put the vast tri-state area on his group’s annual list of the nation’s most endangered historic places. Also among the 11 sites are a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Los Angeles, historic Catholic churches in Boston and decaying buildings in downtown Detroit.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 11 Most Endangered Places 2005.