The Tribune-Democrat, Johnstown’s daily paper, covered the 9-11 Memorial Quilt Project on September 8, 2005. That was the week the Pennsylvania quilt came to Somerset County and was shown to family members of the Flight 93 passengers and crew. The article itself hasn’t survived. The old site kept it as two scanned images, and the Internet Archive saved neither one. What we can explain is why the story landed the way it did in Johnstown.
A city that knows sudden loss
On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam above Johnstown gave way a little after 3 p.m. The water reached the city at 4:07. A list printed about fourteen months later set the death toll at 2,209, and the National Park Service says the real number was probably well over 3,000, because some victims were never counted. Warnings were sent from South Fork that afternoon, but none did any good once the dam failed. The private club that owned the dam and its lake was never held legally responsible.
The water came back. The St. Patrick’s Day flood of 1936 killed almost two dozen people, and the flash flood of July 19 and 20, 1977 killed at least 85. Three disasters in less than a century left Johnstown with a long habit of public mourning. The Johnstown Flood Museum downtown and the Johnstown Flood National Memorial at the old dam site in St. Michael both exist to keep the 1889 dead from being forgotten.
Flight 93, about 18 miles away
On September 11, 2001, Flight 93 crashed in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville. By the Park Service’s directions, the site is about 18 miles from Johnstown: south on Route 219, then east on Route 30. The region now has two national memorials to sudden death on a large scale, the flood memorial and the Flight 93 National Memorial, about 25 miles apart.
Johnstown’s congressman, John Murtha, whose district included the crash site, introduced the bill to create the Flight 93 memorial on March 7, 2002. It became law that September 24 as Public Law 107-226, which made the memorial a unit of the National Park System and set up an advisory commission to plan it. The Tribune-Democrat has covered the memorial every year since, and the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra has performed there.
The quilt comes home
The project’s organizer was originally from Johnstown, and the Pennsylvania quilt was the most personal of the five. It is cut in the shape of the state, red on a blue field of stars, with 102 cross-stitched squares and one at Somerset County’s place on the map that reads “Let’s Roll!” Bringing it to Somerset County in September 2005 meant bringing it a short drive from where she grew up, to a region that already knew how to grieve together. The Somerset paper ran its own story the next day; see our summary of the Daily American article. For the rest of that trip, see Pennsylvania, 2005, and for the quilt’s design, how the quilts were made.
If you have a copy of the Tribune-Democrat article, please get in touch. See all coverage.
Sources: National Park Service, Johnstown Flood National Memorial FAQ and Flight 93 National Memorial directions; Public Law 107-226; Levi Fox, “A Flight and A Flood”, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, 2015.