Battlefield preservation began immediately after the Civil War and continued into the present, first through local history advocates and students and later through organized efforts that created battlefield parks such as Gettysburg and Antietam in the 1890s under the War Department. Memorial groups also erected monuments to both Confederate and Union soldiers into the early twentieth century. At Brandy Station Battlefield, the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a marker on Fleetwood Hill in 1926, and for decades it was the only interpretation of the Civil War's largest cavalry battle, where 12,000 Union soldiers fought 9,500 Confederates and began the Gettysburg campaign. As development increasingly threatened unprotected battlefield land by 1987, concern for Virginia battlefields and others across the country led to the formation in Fredericksburg of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, later renamed the Civil War Trust and based in Washington DC. In Culpeper County, rising development pressure in the late 1980s, especially at Brandy Station Battlefield, led to the creation of the Brandy Station Foundation in 1989 with funding from the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, helping preserve much of the battlefield, including Fleetwood Hill, parts of Cedar Mountain Battlefield, and Hansbrough's Ridge, where the Army of the Potomac spent the winter of 1863-1864.
