 With the Confederate loss, their best opportunity to retake the Mississippi Valley and achieve numerical superiority with the Union armies in the west disappeared, and the heavy losses suffered at Shiloh represented the start of an unwinnable war of attrition.Shiloh's importance as a Civil War battle, coupled with the lack of widespread agricultural or industrial development in the battle area after the war, led to its development as one of the first five battlefields restored by the federal government in the 1890s, when the Shiloh National Military Park was established under the administration of the War Department; the National Park Service took over the park in 1933.The federal government had saved just over 2,000 acres at Shiloh by 1897, and consolidated those gains by adding another 1,700 acres by 1954, these efforts gradually dwindled and government involvement proved insufficient to preserve the land on which the battle took place.