Cumberland Trail Fire District To Memorialize Fallen First Responders on 9/11
Robert A. DeFrank Trending
The Cumberland Trail Fire District will mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with a memorial for the fire district members who gave their all. The ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. at the Belmont County Heritage Museum across from the courthouse at 101 W. Main St.
"On Sept. 11, we're going to unveil our monument, it's at the courthouse right in front of the Heritage Museum," Lt. Jeremy Rife, organizing the memorial presentation, said.
"Basically we wanted to dedicate something to all the past volunteer and CTFD employees that are no longer with us and served St. Clairsville and Richland Township, so we threw together the idea to come up with a monument. We put the work in and got a lot of help from some generous donors and got the monument put in," he said.
The monument includes the Cumberland Fire District patch, union patch and association patch. Braido Memorials in Bethesda made the monument.
"There's a huge list of donors we're going to recognize the day of the unveiling ceremony," Rife said.
"It's already installed. We were waiting on a good day to try to touch on a couple things and we figured Sept. 11 would give us an opportunity to speak about it and kind of have a bit of remembrance about that day as well," Rife said.
He said past volunteer members and their families will be attending the ceremony, as well as the current firefighters, city leaders, the Richland Township trustees, the fire board and possibly some area representatives.
Rife noted the significance of the Sept. 11 attacks to first responders.
"That's one thing throughout the nation most first responders have always taken to heart, Sept. 11 and how many first responders we lost, so we kind of see it as a way to take a little bit of time out of our day and remember all those who gave their lives that day to save in one of the biggest rescue operations that have ever taken place in the nation and a lot of them, unfortunately, didn't make it, so we want to remember them too."