Battle lines drawn over casino near Gettysburg

GETTYSBURG - Nearly 150 years ago, with Confederate troops upon them, Gettysburg citizens united in their support of the Union cause.

Today a decidedly uncivil war over a proposed casino a half-mile outside the boundaries of the Gettysburg National Military Park has divided this historic community.

Since the casino plan - the second in five years - was unveiled in December, battle lines have hardened and deepened, pitting neighbors, businesses, preservationists, and veterans against one another as the debate has gained national attention.

A showdown is expected Tuesday in a small conference room at a Comfort Inn several hundred yards from where President Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address in 1863. Nearly 400 people - a record number for a Pennsylvania gaming hearing - are scheduled to testify on whether gambling belongs near one of the nation's first "hallowed" grounds.

The debate over the future of Gettysburg, where 8,000 died during the historic battle in 1863, comes as a war of words rages across the globe over whether an Islamic center should be built several blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York.

The issues in both are linked to the question of "sacred ground," what defines it and what constitutes its desecration.

"Gettysburg will always be caught in that tension between commercialism and veneration," said Edward Linenthal, professor at Indiana University and author of Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields, which features a section on Gettysburg. "This is the latest chapter, not the last, in an ongoing conversation."

The casino proposal - put forth by David LeVan, a former Conrail president and Philadelphia school board member - would put slot machines and table games in a foundering conference center and hotel on Emmitsburg Road, a half-mile from the boundary of Gettysburg National Military Park and two miles from the Mason-Dixon Line.

LeVan - who lives across the street from the park's visitors center and has personally invested $4 million in the Gettysburg battlefield and other local preservation projects - failed in his first attempt in 2005 to win a license for a larger casino at a different site farther from the battlefield.

Now LeVan and other investors, including former state representative and Chester Downs ex-president Joseph Lashinger Jr., are vying with three other bidders seeking the last of two "resort" licenses. (The first was awarded to the planned casino at the Valley Forge convention center).