They are also harder to come by all the time. A recent and instructive example of this growing difficulty in creating public areas occurred at Mason Neck, a richly scenic and natural bootshaped peninsula projecting into the estuary not far below Mount Vernon, where George Mason's old home and a part of his estate are immaculately preserved by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Neck has twelve miles of riverfront and 6500 acres of undeveloped land only eighteen miles from the center of Washington, and though the river here is part of the eutrophic upper estuary, often thick with algae in summer, the place is a wildlife paradise, with forests of mature and stately trees and a Great Marsh of around 1000 acres. Incredibly, bald eagles still roost and even nest there, a fact which provided the initial spark for heavy public opposition to recent proposals for residential development of the Neck.
Supported by the Potomac Task Force whenever possible, the defenders of the peninsula organized as the Conservation Committee for Mason Neck and fought its cause almost inch by inch, with many setbacks and much expense of time and energy and money, through referendum elections and political hanky-panky and high levels of government. They won; development was forestalled and the nearly certain prospect is for a large composite public holding for park and wildlife refuge use, made up of Federal, state, and regional acquisitions.
In many parts of the Basin, old human excesses that in their time were not at all beneficial or protective have contributed paradoxically to the present good condition of the landscape. After boom had lifted her skirts and moved on elsewhere from the weary Tidewater, for instance, the region's long subsequent drowse on the fringes of action and history meant that it escaped many modern troubles, at least until recently. Not very long ago, many parts of it were more easily reached by slow boat than by car or train. Partly as a result, big tracts of military land there acquired mainly when acreage was cheap—57,000 acres around the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, are one example—form a valuable public asset for potential future use. And throughout Tidewater here and there, old estates in private hands guard their woods and fields and shores against increasing development, though more and more each year crumple before pressure and the temptation of speculators' and developers' cash.
Similarly, after the mountains of the upper parts of the Basin were logged bare and in many places burned off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—"Cut out and get out" was the slogan—their stripped and eroded state and their effect on the streams made it possible, and essential, for the Federal and state governments to buy up wide areas there as public forest land in the 1930's and to nurse them back to beauty and usefulness. The Shenandoah National Park dates from that same time, as do some state parks in the mountain regions. Some private owners of forest land in that area, though not enough, have taken their cue from the government agencies and seek a safe sustained yield of timber and pulpwood rather than a quick cash-in.
In many rural reaches of the Basin, for that matter, the kind of use private ownership gives the land is still an enhancement of the landscape rather than a smear on it. The beauty of farm land and pastures and old structures is as much a part of this country's heritage as is wilderness, for in its traditional forms farming has shaped a kind of wholeness and beauty all its own, blending with nature and working with it. The limestone soils in the huge trough of the Shenandoah Valley, for example, have been tilled and grazed during about two and a half centuries' occupation by white men. But for the most part agriculture there has been devoted to continuing productivity rather than to exploitation, and the rolling terrain, intersected by stream valleys and wooded ridges, has prevented much application of the massive techniques of fence-to-fence cultivation that prevail on the "factory farms" of the Midwest and West nowadays. The miles on miles of varied, carefully managed fields and pastures, with fat herds and handsome old stone houses and barns, nearly always against a backdrop of dark mountains and with a pleasant river or creek running at hand, among trees, have a potent storybook appeal that sticks in the memory of anyone who ever saw them.
The long narrow valley down which the South Branch flows is similar on its scale, as are many other arable strips and patches of the upper Basin that remember Shawnee days and Civil War guerillas. Near Washington, farms are waging a losing rearguard action against speculation and sprawl, but in the Piedmont to the north and west of the city lie some of the most pleasant rural landscapes in the United States. Up the drainages of the Catoctin and the Monocacy north of the Potomac, these are still functional landscapes, used mainly for dairy farming. In Virginia they tend to be less so, for this is the hunt country, where cosmopolitan gentry raise purebred stock on curried pastures, ride to hounds in red coats on frosty mornings and by great expenditure of money not garnered from crops or cattle have tastefully restored and maintained whole neighborhoods of venerable estates, as well as some superb old towns like Waterford, in traditional dignified beauty.
As these people have grasped—and others like them scattered throughout the Basin—most of the pull of farming landscapes and old houses and towns is nostalgic, rooted in a sense of the past and of the way the look and feel of a stone fence or a portico or a boxwood hedge can fill out understanding of people who were there long long before. This is what has been called "the scenery of association," and it is more deeply ingrained in the Potomac country than in newer parts of the nation, where "scenery" is most likely to denote the aspect of wild and natural places. With a history going back deep into the 1600's and long occupation by Indians before that, the Basin in many places has archaeological layers of such meaning. It tugs powerfully at the imagination of anyone with a sense of human continuity, and is woven in with the natural framework of things, as for instance the grove of chestnut oaks in the Bloody 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.