On September 11, 2001, the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 prevented four terrorists and their hijacked plane from reaching its intended target in Washington, D.C. In response, people poured expressions of love and gratitude onto the field where the forty heroes crashed the plane. A month after the attacks, the first tributes were collected from impromptu memorials surrounding the crash site. These 68 items were the first of what has grown to a collection of over 40,000 objects documenting the wellspring of emotions prompted by the attacks of September 11. Managing such a unique collection is both a privilege and a challenge for Betsy Keene, Curator of the National Parks of Western Pennsylvania. Betsy will present not only the history of the tribute collection at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, but also the special concerns and issues associated with it.
Keene, a native of Durham, North Carolina, attended Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania as an undergraduate and before completing her MA in History with a Museum Studies Certificate at the University of Delaware. She has been a National Parks employee since October 2016 and has worked at four parks—the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historic Park, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park, Mount Rainier National Park, and Colonial National Historic Park—before coming to the Western Pennsylvania parks in 2020.
