Central Minnesota city keeps memory of 9/11 victims alive with monument
Friday marks 25 years since 9/11, and a small Minnesota community has found a special way to honor the victims year-round.
"I was going to get a truck repaired. And I was driving in to get it repaired, and they said the towers got hit," said Dale Borgmann.
Like so many Americans, Borgmann remembers where he was and what he was doing when terrorists attacked. But he also remembers the wave of patriotism that followed.
"It was tough. It was very tough. I wanted to put some flags up. I couldn't find any American flags anywhere," said Borgmann.
That's because they were selling out everywhere. So, Borgmann and other Rockville, Minnesota, residents decided to honor the 9/11 victims in a bigger way.
"We got nine of us altogether. We kept on dreaming, getting ideas on how we were going to do this," Borgmann said.
He says Daryl and Rosie Steil were the ones who got the idea of trying to bring a World Trade Center artifact to Rockville. They contacted the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which agreed to give them a steel beam recovered from the wreckage.
The beam is 6 feet tall and weighs nearly 1,000 pounds. So initially, moving it from New York to Rockville was an obstacle.
But luckily, a St. Cloud, Minnesota, trucking company stepped up to bring the artifact home. In 2015, the steel beam became a permanent part of Rockville's veterans' monument, made possible through community donations. The names of more than 400 firefighters and police officers can also be found etched into granite tablets.
"Rodney, our fire chief, he says there are always people up here. All the time," said Borgmann. "They expect it in a bigger town. Not in our little community."
For Borgmann, the monument ensures that a small town will never forget what happened that fateful day.
"It's something about that piece of metal, makes you walk up to it and touch it ... just to feel it. It still does. I walk up to it and I feel amazed, what that metal has gone through," said Borgmann.
The Rockville monument was built outside the fire hall in 2016,15 years after 9/11.
