ECONOMIC GEOLOGY AND THE BATTLEFIELD AT CEDAR CREEK

Moving up the “pigs path,” along the base of Massanutten Mountain in the Shenandoah Valley, a resistant limb remnant of the Appalachian folded Mountains, John Gordon’s Division of Jubal Early’s Confederate forces moved against the weakly held left wing of the Union Army under the immediate command of Union General Crook. The surprise was complete and along with the coordinated attack with CSA General Kershaw the Confederate forces rolled up the Union Forces in the early morning hours of October 19^th, 1864. The outnumbered Confederate forces stalled in the early afternoon allowing Union General Phil Sheridan to rally his troops for a counter attack driving back the Confederate Forces. Now, nearly 150 years later, the Cedar Creek Battlefield site is under another siege as a result of the propose expansion of the Carmeuse Mining operation at the Middletown Quarry. The Bellefounte Formation of the Beekmantown Limestone Group provides high quality concrete stone and other crushed limestone products at this quarry site and the proposed expansion of the quarry to access this material will remove 600 acres of this battlefield site. The conflict between the North and South has changed to an economic standoff between preservationist and the expansion of a geologically important crushed limestone source.