Shanksville, Pennsylvania

Christian Shank, a German immigrant, arrived in this fold of Somerset County in seventeen ninety-eight and built a cabin on Stony Creek, followed by a grist mill and two saw mills. The town that bore the family name was laid out in eighteen twenty-nine, and Shanksville was incorporated as a borough in nineteen thirteen. For most of its life it was a quiet coal-country village, surrounded by the kind of strip-mine landscape that had shaped western Pennsylvania for a century.

Then on September eleventh, two thousand one, United Airlines Flight Ninety-Three came down in a reclaimed strip-mine field less than two miles from the center of town. Forty passengers and crew died after mounting a revolt against the hijackers. The Flight Ninety-Three National Memorial, whose first phase opened in twenty eleven, now stands at that field.