A lawsuit was filed Friday in a bid to prevent a massive data processing facility from being built next to Manassas National Battlefield Park/Kurt Repanshek file

A lawsuit has been filed in a bid to halt a massive data processing center from being built next to Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia.

Prince William County supervisors in December voted 4-3 to rezone 2,100 acres next to the battlefield, which was the setting for the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) on July 21, 1861, and the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas) over nearly the same ground during August 28-30, 1862, so the PW Digital Gateway could be built there.

“The Manassas Battlefield is a national treasure and the very definition of hallowed ground,” said David Duncan, president of the American Battlefield Trust, which joined the lawsuit with nine area residents. “Hundreds of thousands of people visit this national park every year, generating tourism dollars for the community and providing local residents with recreational trails and open space. It is reckless in the extreme to jeopardize this historic sanctuary over a development that could easily be built elsewhere in the state.”

A release from the Trust described the planned data center as the "world's largest."

The 81-page lawsuit, filed Friday, claims the county failed to consider the enivonmental fallout of the project, ignored county regulations in rezoning the land, and that special use permits for the project were not filed. A press release from the Trust states that the proposed data center "would overshadow famed Brawner Farm where, at the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862, Union and Confederate forces faced off against one another in horrific combat. The fallow fields that were the launching point for one of the most devasting and decisive assaults of the Civil War could soon be blanketed with as many as thirty-seven data centers — eight-story, drab concrete-and-steel behemoths that would loom over the battlefield park."

“Even a month after the vote, it remains dumbfounding that Prince William County ignored its own professional staff, its planning commission, hundreds of concerned citizens, and pleas from the National Park Service and the historic preservation community to protect one of the County’s most famous and treasured landmarks,” said Duncan in the release.

In reviewing the proposal in 2022, Justin Patton, the Prince William County archaeologist, wrote that the project would "have a high potential to adversely affect cultural resources in the following forms: indirect effects such as Audio, and Visual; and direct effects in the destruction of the resource. Transportation improvements necessary to implement land use and zoning changes, will likely have an indirect and direct effects on our history as well."

Among those who voiced opposition to the data center was filmmaker Ken Burns, who in January 2022 wrote the county supervisors to urge them to oppose the project.

"As a student and chronicler of American history for more than 40 years, I can attest to how fragile our precious heritage is and how susceptible it can be to the ravages of 'progress,'" Burns said in that letter. "I learned while making my documentary series The Civil War in the late 1980s—and again when I made my 2009 series on the history of the national parks—how crucial the preservation of our historic landscapes is, and I fear the devastating impact the development of up to 2,133 acres of data centers will have on this hallowed ground."