Ruthsburg’s cause was this newspaper’s mission

Rural Ramblings, By Bruce Hotchkiss, Senior Editor

The Delmarva Farmer was born in a sun-splashed room on the 11th floor of a conference center hotel in Ocean City in November 1977.
The precise date escapes me, but no matter.
Three sketches of the flag (the name of the paper which would appear at the top of Page 1) were spread on the bed.
We picked one.
It appeared on the first issue of this newspaper, which came off the press early in March of 1978 — again, don’t hold me to the date. — and that flag is still there today.
There, in that hotel room, the mission of this newspaper also was framed. 
We would become a voice for farmers, not only across Delmarva but across the Mid-Atlantic.
The mission would be, we resolved, no less irrevocable, no less inviolate than the flag.
We have never wavered from that mission.
And now we come to The Battle of Ruthsburg.
Never, in our experience, in our plus-30 years of publication did more farmers need a voice than in that battle.
As the editorial staff of The Delmarva Farmer gathered, we resolved, anew, to carry the banner of the farmers — whom one of the opposition would call, degradingly, “the Ruthsburgers.”
By the way, the Ruthsburgers won.
It seemed preposterous, indeed ludicrous from the start, that the feds — the General Services Administration and the Department of State, even after an all-night partisan binge — could settle on Ruthsburg as the site for a war games playground.
Good heavens!
Ruthsburg, a country crossroads community surrounded by corn, soybean and wheat fields, known across Queen Anne’s County for its new community center and remembered for its old community center where folks from all over once would gather for its famed oyster and ham dinners on election nights.
Ruthsburg, which is fed by single-lane macadam roads, its farm fields offering a pathway for streams feeding the lake at nearby Tuckahoe State Park — whose waters in turn, eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay — its wooded lands providing the habitat for the Delmarva fox squirrel.
Ruthsburg, whose very fertile fields help Queen Anne’s County lead the state in the production of corn, wheat and soybeans, a community lacking even the most basic infrastructure for development, where folks come seeking a better place to raise their families and knowing, full well by the way, that when they build that new home, they’ll have to dig a well and install a septic system to go along with it.
Define farm country. ... Name it Ruthsburg.
No wonder the much-anticipated Environmental Assessment never appeared.
The GSA could never shake it loose.
No surprise.
It must have been apparent from the start, at least to the bureaucrats charged with making the assessment, that somebody made a big mistake.
Ruthsburg didn’t have chance of passing that test, and the problem for the feds then became how to back out and still save face.
Finally, after months of delay, in a letter to Sen. Barbara Mikulksi, the GSA pulled the plug on Ruthsburg and said it would look someplace else.
That unleashed a torrent of whining on Facebook (and the like) from those who had backed the proposed anti-terrorism training center.
They excoriated the county for remaining essentially silent and unorganized, allowing what they conceived as a once-in-a-lifetime economic windfall to slip through their fingers.
Indeed, no significant challenge of the Ruthsburgers ever arose in the community. 
Why would it?
The prevailing impression?  It was a done deal.
Why get worked up? Sit back and relax.
Hey, this is the feds, and if they want it, they’re going to have it.
Don’t sweat it. Ain’t no handful of farmers in Ruthsburg gonna make a difference. It’ll happen.
That it didn’t happen is testimony to the enormous weight of environmental, economic and cultural evidence against it and to the determination and passion of the Ruthsburgers to make sure it didn’t, for the sake of their families, their future and their way of life.
However, there’s just one loose thread.
As various possible sites were being studied, who made the decision, or who made that telephone call that said: “Let’s go with Ruthsburg.”
We’d sure like to shake that one loose.