Shanksville, PA: To the Places Where Things Changed Forever

The town of Somerset sits quietly among the rolling hills of southwest Pennsylvania. At the intersection of North Pleasant Avenue and Stoystown Road the twin silos of the Somerset Milling Company stand white and proud, watching over Coxes Creek and the tracks of the CSX. These freight lines run up to Johnstown and down to Rockwood; to Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Baltimore; north to Montreal and south to Miami; through Indianapolis, Indiana and Dickson, Tennessee; clear across to Memphis and all the way down to New Orleans.

Stoystown Road runs northeast from the center of town, under the Pennsylvania Toll Pike and past the Somerset County Airport. Through the sleepy town of Friedens and toward Indian Lake the simplicity of yesteryear plays hide and seek with the occasional passerby. A white trailer stands in the tall grass, Funnel Cakes painted across the side in red carnival script. Behind sits a big old country house, the kind with the wrap-around front porch. A small hand-made sign pokes out of the weeds around a bend, advertising someone’s Maple Syrup. Rivers amble free of concrete diversion. Signs of traditional pursuits and simple times persist, all the way to Shanksville and the crash site of United Flight 93.

At first there were no fences and no signs, no informational pamphlets and no parking lot. “People in the community just began to volunteer, showing visitors and strangers where the site was,” explained one of the two National Park Service rangers on duty. We listened to him as we stood in the sun, in the gravel lot outside the makeshift visitor center, a stone’s throw from the crest of a hill overlooking a wide-open field. “They set up a fence, kept track of visitors. Basically became a kind of task force.”

That fence they set up was forty feet in length, one foot for each of the victims of the downed flight. Decorated with messages, flowers and flags, this fence served as the Flight 93 Memorial for a time.

Three months after our visit the first phase of the memorial was complete and open to the public. Since then the place has evolved in design to include a curving walkway along the northern edge of the field, a 40-foot Wall of Names, and a boulder marking the point where the plane hit ground. But for all the planning and long-term construction, the Flight 93 National Memorial consists largely of a vast swath of empty grassland sitting amid the widely scattered farms, forests and homes.

On our way back to the highway we passed again the country house with the wrap-around porch and the funnel cake trailer. Another maple syrup sign beckoned meekly to the traffic heading south as we now were. A detour brought us past an old billboard advertising Keystone Beer before leading up to a ridge that put us above the lush hills, the quiet farms, the thick forests, and the remaining gentility of a place that once sat in obscure innocence.