This 2,200 acre National Park Service memorial commemorates the site of the Flight 93 crash in central Pennsylvania. The centerpiece of the Memorial is the bowl-like Field of Honor which is embraced by forty groves of forty trees, one grove for each hero lost in the Flight 93 crash. A circular walkway around the Bowl brings visitors to an overlook of the Sacred Ground where the plane came to rest, planted in a blooming native meadow.

Given the site is atop a former strip mine, the entire design was imagined as a place of healing from both the scars of environmental damage and an unimaginable terrorist act. The site’s soils, heavily damaged by strip mining, required careful design in order to support the warm season meadow restoration and 1600 grove plantings that define the memorial landscape. Collaborating with mine reclamation specialist Dr. James Burger of Virginia Tech, innovative soil building strategies were implemented to create conditions for the flourishing of native plantings.

Paul Josey, while working at NBW, was responsible for developing innovative reclamation and bioretention soils profiles and collaborated on all planting designs, construction detailing and administration through the Sacred Ground, Memorial Groves, Field of Honor and Visitor Center phases of the memorial.