Shanksville, Pennsylvania

Shanksville is a small borough in Somerset County first settled in seventeen ninety-eight by Christian Shank, a German immigrant whose family name stuck to the village. It was incorporated as a borough in nineteen thirteen. For most of its history it was a quiet coal-and-farming community tucked into the Allegheny highlands, population never reaching beyond a few hundred people.

That changed forever on September eleventh, two thousand one, when United Airlines Flight Ninety-Three crashed into a reclaimed strip-mine field just outside town. Passengers on board, having learned of the World Trade Center attacks by phone, voted to fight back and stormed the cockpit. The plane went down at ten oh three in the morning.

All forty-four people on board were killed, but the Capitol, believed to be the hijackers' target, was spared. The Flight Ninety-Three National Memorial now stands on the site.