On September 9, 2005, the Daily American of Somerset, Pennsylvania ran a story by staff writer Vicki Rock headlined “Woman inspired to quilt by Sept. 11 events.” It appeared two days before the fourth anniversary of the Flight 93 crash, in the county where the plane came down.
What the story said
Rock began with the organizer’s decision, two days after the attacks, to lead a quilt project. She was living in Tuscumbia, Alabama, by then, but she was originally from Johnstown, about 18 miles from the crash site. She told the paper she had recently finished quilts that a girl had started after the Columbine shooting, and had hoped there would never be another tragedy to make a quilt for. On September 13, 2001, she felt led to make one anyway.
The story quoted the project’s motto, “With Needle and Thread, Precious Lives We Hope to Mend,” and described the Pennsylvania quilt closely. It has a blue background with stars and a large red Keystone shape that holds 102 squares, each one cross-stitched by hand. The square at Somerset County’s place on the map reads “Let’s Roll!” with stars on a blue field. The paper’s photo shows the organizer holding the quilt up in front of the Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, where she had brought it.
The first page ended with the size of the whole effort. There were five quilts, one each for the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Pennsylvania, the New York fire department and the New York police department. 375 stitchers in 47 states and 14 countries made 524 squares, and the work took three years.
The anniversary notice beside it
Next to the story, the paper printed the plan for that year’s ceremony at the temporary memorial: 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. on September 11, with the reading of the passengers’ and crew’s names, the tolling of bells, music and short remarks. Access was from Lambertsville Road only, because the Route 31 bridge near Technology Center Road was closed, and shuttles ran from a parking lot on Skyline Road until 9:15 a.m. It is a small record of how the site worked in the years before the permanent memorial opened.
What survives
The old project site showed the article as two scanned clippings. The story isn’t on the Daily American’s own website, so the original source today is that old page, saved by the Internet Archive in 2006. We don’t republish the clipping; the summary above is in our own words. Click the placeholder to open the archived page in a new window.
If you have a clean copy of the full clipping, please send it.
The Johnstown paper covered the project the day before; see why that story mattered in Johnstown. For the rest of the 2005 trip, including the presentation to Flight 93 families at the Somerset County courthouse, see Pennsylvania, 2005. For the quilt’s design, see how the quilts were made. See all coverage.