On the morning of September 11, 2026, residents of Appleton, Newfoundland, will gather once more at the riverside park that a group of grateful strangers helped create, to mark a quarter-century since the day the “plane people” came to town. The ceremony at the Appleton Peace Park, scheduled for 11:00 a.m., is part of a wider set of commemorations across central Newfoundland marking the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and in tiny Appleton, the ritual has become a fixed part of the September calendar.
To understand why Appleton marks this American tragedy so faithfully, you have to go back to a morning when the world’s airline routes were violently reconfigured. When the United States closed its airspace after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thirty-eight flights bound for America were abruptly rerouted and touched down at Gander International Airport, carrying roughly seven thousand passengers and crew members. There was no plan for any of it. As Gander’s then-mayor, Claude Elliott, later recalled, no contingency planning existed for what to do with thousands of bewildered, exhausted, frightened people who had landed, unannounced, four or five days from home.
The surrounding communities absorbed them. Schools, churches and community centres across the region became dormitories; the ice surface at the Gander Community Centre was pressed into service as an enormous walk-in refrigerator for the mountains of donated food. In Appleton, stranded passengers were taken in, bedded down in homes and community spaces, fed, and cared for by volunteers. Derm Flynn, then mayor of Appleton, reflected on those days years later: “It was a time that brought out some of the worst in humanity, but here in this area, it brought out the best in humanity.”
The guests, in turn, never forgot. When the passengers eventually made it home, many chose to express their thanks in a lasting way. In Appleton, the stranded visitors pooled a donation of about five thousand dollars, and the town used it to build the Riverfront Peace Park — a place that would become the spiritual centre of the community’s relationship with 9/11.
For Appleton, and for Flynn in particular, the park was only the beginning of a long devotion to remembrance. The annual service grew into a solemn, well-attended civic ritual with its own traditions: a memorial service amid the trees, the planting of a tree dedicated to 9/11 in keeping with ceremony tradition, and, in some years, a handbell choir from the local church providing music. Over the years, dignitaries from both sides of the border have stood in the park — Newfoundland’s Lieutenant Governor Frank Fagan and his wife, the province’s Gander MHA and MP, and the United States Consul General in Canada. On the 16th anniversary in 2017, the now-retired American Airlines captain Beverly Bass, whose aircraft was the 36th of 38 to land at Gander, spoke from the park, recalling a passenger’s letter that said they had “landed in the most peaceful place on earth.”
The park has also acquired a physical anchor for that memory: a steel beam from the World Trade Center, donated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in recognition of the town’s hospitality. It was installed in the Peace Park and formally dedicated there on September 11, 2013, beside a plaque honouring both the victims of the attacks and the volunteers who hosted the plane people.
The story of Appleton and its neighbours, of course, travelled far beyond Newfoundland. The Tony Award-winning musical “Come From Away,” by playwrights Irene Sankoff and David Hein, turned the region’s extraordinary days into a global sensation.
When the 25th anniversary arrives this September, Appleton’s ceremony will take its place within a constellation of commemorations across central Newfoundland. A larger commemoration is also planned at Gander’s Steele Community Centre at 2:00 p.m. on the same day.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of that September morning, at eleven o’clock, with the World Trade Center steel standing in the park, the people of Appleton will gather once more to remember the nearly three thousand people lost in the attacks, and to thank the plane people whose gratitude built a park in the “most peaceful place on earth.”