DALTON, Ga. — Another key piece of Whitfield County’s Civil War heritage has been preserved, and it was done with no local property tax dollars.

The Board of Commissioners on Monday voted 4-0 to accept the 309-acre Grant farm off Crow Valley Road from the Civil War Trust.

“This preserves our history, and I think it will also help us with tourism because of the interest that is out there in the Civil War,” said Commissioner Roger Crossen. “And I think this is part of (board Chairman) Mike Babb’s legacy. He worked hard on this project, and he worked hard to acquire the 600 acres we already own.”

Thirteen years ago, during Babb’s first tenure as board chairman, the Board of Commissioners used state and federal grants to buy 625 acres on Rocky Face Ridge to help preserve the numerous Civil War fortifications along the ridge and to maintain it as greenspace. The property they accepted Monday is adjacent to the previously acquired property and was itself the site of Civil War battles.

“We want to preserve that property and the history that’s there,” said Babb, whose current term as chairman concludes at the end of this month. “But we also want to develop it for recreation. There’s about a thousand acres there, and maybe 100 of them have actual Civil War sites.”

The county has an agreement with the Northwest Georgia chapter of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association (NWGA SORBA) to create mountain bike trails on the ridge. NWGA SORBA played a similar role in the development of the city of Dalton’s Raisin Woods Mountain Bike Park.

The 2015 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) contains $150,000 for a parking lot for the park, which will be built on the Grant farm property.

Apart from that, the only money the county put into the project was $45,000 of Tennessee Valley Authority easement funds (paid to the county for the TVA easement through the Carbondale Business Park) toward the $1.38 million purchase price for the property. The rest of the money for the purchase came from Dalton Utilities (because it helps preserve the watershed feeding Haig Mill lake) and the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program, as well as private groups and foundations such as the Civil War Trust, the Lyndhurst Foundation in Chattanooga, the Community Foundation of Northwest Georgia, the Riverview Foundation in Chattanooga and Save the Dalton Battlefields.