The Mathews County Board of Supervisors is moving ahead with unusual plans to deed the public land under a Confederate statue on the historic courthouse green to a private preservation group, aiming to prevent any future residents from taking it down.An isolated community of farms and fishing villages along the Chesapeake Bay at the tip of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, Mathews has about 8,600 residents, about 8 percent of whom are Black.“There is no public mandate for such an unprecedented and irreversible transfer,” county commonwealth’s attorney Tom C. Bowen III wrote in a letter to the Post-Gazette newspaper and also posted on Facebook.“I think all of us here would’ve liked to entertain the idea that we could just leave it just like it sits, go back to what we used to call normal,” board chairman Paul Hudgins said during a Nov. 22 meeting.Late last month, the board called a special meeting to take up whether to waive a county subdivision ordinance that requires property to be a larger size before it can be carved into smaller lots."