A MEMORIAL TO 9/11
Student garden, sculpture created in 2003
TOWAMENCIN >> On Sumneytown Pike, just east of the driveway entrance to the North Montco Technical Career Center, stands a steel memorial to one of America’s darkest days.
And after nearly two decades, that memorial is still teaching students about September 11, 2001, how the world changed — and how local students chose to mark that dark day.
“On the first anniversary of 9/11, our teachers asked the students for input, and Mary Ann’s students wanted to create the garden,” said North Montco spokeswoman Suzette McHugh.
Mary Ann Fry, a horticulture teacher with the school at the time who has since retired, worked in the months after the attacks to design the school’s 9/11 Memorial Garden, the landscaped bed that sits on the lawn near the school’s front entrance. Inside the garden stands a sculpture designed by welding instructor Bill Ludlow, who has since passed away, and NMTCC class of 2003 welding student Jon Garnett.
Two dawn redwood trees stand at the rear of the garden, which are meant to represent the twin towers of the World Trade Center destroyed that day. Those particular trees were chosen because they are closely related to the Sequoia, large redwood trees grown in California, where the two
flights that destroyed each tower were headed before being hijacked. Their needles turn yellow-orange each fall before losing their needles, leaving bare trees meant to evoke the two towers, and the green needles then return in spring as a reminder that life goes on.
In front of those two trees stands a five-sided patch of soil meant to represent the Pentagon building also attacked on 9/11, and planted within are shrubs commonly found in the southern U.S., and white Japanese Skimmia flowers that turn red in fall and leave evergreen foliage through the winter. The mulch bed itself contains Pennsylvania wildflowers and grasses meant to remember the fourth flight lost that day near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, with flowers that bloom at all times of year.
And in the center of the bed, still standing proudly, is a stainless steel sculpture of the New York City skyline before the attacks, which was designed and built by Garnett as his senior project in 2003 and dedicated on the anniversary that year. The smaller stainless steel buildings stand in sharp contrast to the two towers, each four feet tall, which are made of mild steel meant to rust away over the years.
On the first anniversary of the attacks in 2002, North Montco began holding a luncheon and ceremony to honor local police, firefighters, medical responders and veterans from branches of the military, according to MediaNews Group archives. That ceremony continued until a renovation project in 2010 took away much of the space needed to park their vehicles, and would typically include giving flowers to each first responder, who would place them on the sculpture.
Students in the school’s floral design and landscaping classes help maintain the garden during the school year, prepare arrangements for memorial services, and once sold flower arrangements to raise money for the memorial’s materials. McHugh said this week that while a large schoolwide event to mark the anniversary will not be held this year due to COVID-19, teachers are marking the date in other ways. Two protective services teachers will discuss the attacks in their class, then follow up with lessons next week on PTSD and the Patriot Act, while visiting the memorial garden this morning (Friday), the day before the anniversary.
Garnett, the student sculptor, has not been in contact with the school for several years, and his grandparents did attend the ceremony for several years after the anniversary but have since stopped, Fry said. In 2013 longtime school administrative director Michael Lucas spoke on the meaning of the memorial, in a video posted by the school to mark the anniversary that year.
“Around the first anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11, faculty and staff members decided they wanted to create a living memorial here at North Montco. Students worked together to create this wonderful memorial,” he said.
“There were many losses that day, and there were many heroes.”
The memorial was created to honor both.
“There were many losses that day, and there were many heroes.” — then-NMTCC administrative director Michael Lucas