STONYCREEK, Pa. — Just about 20 years have passed since Gordon Felt first saw the site where his brother and 39 other people were killed on Flight 93.
It was the ride there that stuck with him most.
The families of the passengers and crew were bused through the "back country roads" of Somerset County, Felt recalled, but the roads weren't empty. They were lined with people; children waved American flags, their parents held signs and first responders stood at intersections to salute them — one of the first signs of the community's warm embrace of the families and of the 40 who died, including his brother, Edward.
Felt told that story on Friday at the Flight 93 Memorial, and in a few hours, the story would spring to life again. Hundreds of people would line the quarter-mile route at the memorial site, watching as 40 people — one-by-one — carried lanterns to honor the passengers and crew who banded together against hijackers to force down Flight 93 two decades ago, thwarting another terror attack on 9/11.
Walking down the route near the crash site, they placed the lights below the names of the 40 who were killed, written on large marble stone panels called the Wall of Names. It’s a yearly ceremony at the memorial, but one that carries extra weight ahead of the 20-year anniversary on Saturday.
“We need this. Our country and the world needs places like the Flight 93 National Memorial because it reminds us of who we are, who we became and perhaps who we could once again become — a healing,” Felt said.
The memorial was busy on Friday as the weekend of commemoration began, serving as a reminder of the community that embraced the families in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It was a reminder, too, that this is the reality day-to-day here in Stonybrook; that it's not just a memorial where presidents speak, though on Saturday, former President George W. Bush will take his turn.
As visitors streamed through the education center to hear the story of Flight 93 onto the observation deck to see the final resting place of the passengers and crew, it served as a symbol of Somerset County's new identity, as a local called it. Henry Cook, who has been involved with the memorial for years and lives here, said the area once considered coal-mining its backbone. Now, it's the 40 heroes, he said, embraced by a community that tried to carry some of the burden for their families.
Friday gave officials a chance to celebrate what the sprawling memorial has become, too. It was built with the help of the families who were trying to process immeasurable loss.
U.S. Rep. John Joyce, who represents Somerset County in Congress, said he first came to the site a month after 9/11 with his wife and children, and remembers the flowers and flags that people left.
"This memorial really shines a light that America has heroes who step forward -- that people unbeknownst even as they were entering a flight to travel to the other part of the United States end up as heroes that we still recognize today," Joyce said as he walked the memorial plaza before the luminaria ceremony.
To the right of the Wall of Names is where Saturday's events will occur. The annual observance ceremony in the morning will feature remarks from Bush. Vice President Kamala Harris will be in attendance, and later in the day, President Joe Biden is slated to visit. The memorial is closed to the public until after the observance ceremony. More than 450 family members are expected to attend, memorial officials said.
Some visitors heard from a panel of memorial officials on Friday, including the lead architect, Paul Murdoch, who described his approach to commemorating the 40 victims in his design.
"It wasn’t us honoring the place. Forty people carried the honor, so we didn't have to design something to honor them," Murdoch said. "We had a place already that carried that... those 40 people made this a field of honor. We just framed it."
John Reynolds, who was on the Flight 93 Federal Advisory Committee that oversaw the creation of the memorial, said it's incumbent upon everyone who works on the memorial and visits it to remember the real reason why they're there: to honor the people who lost their lives in the nearby field.
"Remember that it’s about those people,” Reynolds said, pointing toward the crash site, "whose remains are here. And why they were important in the United States of America and what we believe in. And why they were important in understanding that... to do the right thing is the most important thing that can happen.”
Asked by an attendee to share recollections about his brother, Felt talked of their upbringing in central New York, and how Edward was a mathematically inclined computer science aficionado who went on to become a lead engineer at the start of the internet age. But above all, Edward was a great brother, husband and father, Felt said.
“He got up that morning and had breakfast with his eldest daughter. They used to read the Wall Street Journal together. Ed got in the car," Felt said. "The rest is literally history. Here we are.”
