Two weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, Roxanne Sullivan left her home outside of Shanksville, Pa., in the pouring rain, trudged down a dirt road and crossed a grassy field.
Staring out at the incinerated clearing where United Airlines Flight 93 had plunged into the earth, killing all 40 passengers and crew members and the four hijackers aboard, and bringing the eyes of the world to her small town, Ms. Sullivan dropped to her knees, closed her eyes and prayed for the victims’ souls. It was the first day she and others were allowed by officials to get up close to the site, which is visible from her home.
More than 9,000 days later, she remains devoted to those souls, working as a volunteer at the Flight 93 National Memorial, a national park.
“I’m here because they fell in my backyard,” she said, peering out at the 17-ton sandstone boulder planted in a meadow that marks the spot where the Boeing 757 crashed. “I have a need in my heart to take care of them.”
Ms. Sullivan is part of a small band of Shanksville residents and National Park Service employees who have spent a large portion of their lives making sure that the memory of those 40 people and their sacrifice remain alive. They give tours, speak to groups, receive families, lay wreaths and more.
All of which is no small responsibility. Despite its remote location, nearly 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, the memorial sees an estimated 400,000 visitors a year, according to the National Park Service.
That figure is dwarfed by the more than 13 million who visit Ground Zero annually. But for those who make the effort — the memorial near Shanksville is nearly 10 miles beyond the nearest highway exit, past cornfields, roadside mum sales and honey stands — Ms. Sullivan and others never tire of telling the story.
That is because many may be hearing it for the first time. Roughly 100 million Americans were born after Sept. 11. They may not know that Flight 93, which departed from Newark, N.J., for San Francisco, was the only aircraft of the four that were hijacked that day that never reached its intended target, Washington, D.C.
And they may be unaware that after the hijackers seized control of the plane, many of the passengers, who learned from their loved ones of the Twin Towers attack and realized they were part of the larger plot, banded together to attack the cockpit. And that the hijackers, fearing that the passengers would retake the plane, chose to crash the aircraft in what turned out to be a grassy expanse once mined for coal.
After Congress established a new national park to honor the 40 passengers and crew, the official memorial at the site opened to the public in 2011. Set across 2,000 acres that span the path of the jet before it crashed, the park includes a visitor center and overlook above the crash site, a memorial plaza and a curved path that leads to a marble wall engraved with victims’ names.
A narrow, 93-foot stone cylinder adorned with 40 wind chimes — one per fallen passenger and crew member — stands tall at the memorial’s entrance, completed in 2020.
Adam Shaffer, 44, head of visitor services at the memorial, knows every inch of the grounds, partly because he was there, like Ms. Sullivan, when there was no memorial. And because it is deeply ingrained in his family.
In Shanksville, a community of under 300 people, his father was the chief of Shanksville’s Volunteer Fire Department who responded to the crash, and his mother interviewed hundreds of people for an oral history of Sept. 11. Mr. Shaffer spent his weekends returning home from college to help guide people who came to see the scourged earth. Alongside a group of about 40 volunteers, including Ms. Sullivan, he stood for two hours at a time in that field, telling the story long before an official memorial was built.
The park today “has its roots in the community answering that call all these years ago,” he said.
Mr. Shaffer, who has spent more than two decades steeped in the tragedy and heroism of that day, steps into the empty visitor center every morning before the park opens. There, a news broadcast from Sept. 11 runs on a loop. As part of his job, he gives walking tours that explain the crash and its aftermath.
Like many others, he said he experiences times when the sadness can be too much.
“There’s moments where it creeps in,” Mr. Shaffer said. “There are always moments.”
But he added that the importance of “the story continuing to live” is what eventually prevails.
Ms. Sullivan works her volunteer shift every Thursday, and she is not alone in her dedication. “We have had people who were here on Sept. 11, and are still coming to work in their 70s and in their 80s,” said Stephen Clark, superintendent of the park. “And they have a shift, and I’m here to tell you, unless there’s an ice storm, they’re here.” ”
Before there were shifts, back when the roads around the site were half dirt, Ms. Sullivan collected items that were left on her lawn as a makeshift memorial: flowers, flags, Army boots, a flight attendant’s uniform. Later, she helped the Somerset Historical Center archive more than 30,000 items from similar memorials that popped up around Shanksville.
“How do you handle a jetliner falling in your backyard? You do not,” she said, as a family bowed their heads at the boulder where the plane crashed more than two decades ago. “I want the next generation to remember what we went through.”
“We lived it,” she added. “But it’s your history.”
Hannah Beier contributed reporting.
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