By Linda Wheeler, Washington Post Blogs

More than $1.2 million in grants from the National Park Service’sAmerican Battlefield Protection Program were awarded this week to a variety of national battlefield projects including eight Civil War sites in six states: Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia.

Virginia was the only state to get more than one. A $30,000 grant went to the Bull Run Preserve, Inc. for a series of workshops to teach the public how to respond to the threat of road widens, railroad expansions and cell towers in battlefield areas.

A second grant for $55,000 was acquired by Citizens for Fauquier County for the creation of digital maps and associated GIS data at nine battlefields. The third grant was given to Radford University for $67,000 to develop digital technologies to interpret the battlefields at Saltsville.