Appomattox park scorched to restore field to its Civil War state

Smoke climbed above the charred and blackened field at the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park as firefighters burned a swatch of land.

The grass and brush on the 25-acre field was reduced to ash in about three hours Monday. The low, controlled fire crawled across the ground, burning away the non-native grass and brush in an attempt to restore the historic field to its 1860s state, said Barb Stewart, fire communications specialist for the National Parks Service.

This is the first prescribed burn for the Appomattox national park. Ferguson Field sits off Joel Sweeney Drive on Virginia 24 and marks the edge of the 1,750-acre national park.

Ferguson Field’s exact use in 1865 isn’t known, Stewart said. But it was open land where troops had camped waiting for the surrender at Appomattox Court House.

If left alone, the grass would give way to shrubs, then to pines and cedars, and eventually to hardwoods that would create a canopy that chokes out the other plants, said Reed Johnson, park superintendent. This spot, though, has historical relevance as an open field.

“Once the area has been farmed, it gets invasive grass species that are not native,” Johnson said.

The field has become home to some of those invasive plants. Johnson said burning the field serves several purposes, including adding nutrients to the soil, keeping it from become wooded and eliminating the non-native species to provide room for the natural-occurring plants to grow.

“There are lots of invasive species that suck up the water and crowd out everything else,” Johnson said.

The prescribed burn allows firefighters to mimic the affects of a natural fire caused by a lightning strike, under controlled circumstances that do not threaten people or property.

“What grass was here, we want it to grow back,” said Brian Eick, natural resources manager for the park. “We want it to look like the old field in the 1860s.”

The burn will also help create better habitat for the birds, deer and other animals that live on that land.

Burning the field may become an alternative to mowing, since that leaves a layer of thatch that changes the type of plants that grow there, Eick said.

“In future years, we will come back and see if the composition has changed,” Eick said. “If it has, we’ll come back and do it again.”

Fires have been used to manage park lands since the late 1960s when the National Parks Service decided that naturally occurring and prescribed fires that did not threaten lives or property could be useful in keeping parks healthy and reducing the threat of large, out of control fires.

Weather conditions have to fit. The humidity has to be just right and the winds can’t be so strong that they might carry the fire. The weather is checked several times during the burn to make sure it doesn’t change for the worse, Stewart said.

“There is a good potential for fire to carry this time of year,” Stewart said, because February marks the start of the primary fire season.

Stewart said it will take a couple of weeks, but the blackened earth will start to disappear and by fall visitors won’t be able to tell that a fire happened there.