ROSE HILL, Kan. (KSNW) — Twenty-five years after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a Kansas community is making sure the next generation remembers.

A new memorial in Rose Hill is now complete, with a firsthand connection to Ground Zero helping bring its story to life.

From the storyboards to the stars beneath your feet, nearly every part of this memorial tells a story.

On Friday, Rose Hill will officially dedicate the site. But organizers say this is not just a place to remember 9/11; it is also a space to educate those who were either not alive or too young to remember what happened 25 years ago.

"Okay, so as we approach the memorial, we have different storyboards up here" said Gerald Amato, president of Rose Hill's 9/11 Memorial Committee.

 Retired Wichita firefighter prepares for annual 9/11 stair climb 

Walking through the memorial, the stories of Sept. 11 speak for themselves.

Each storyboard tells another part of the tragedy, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93.

"Our committee put a lot of time and effort into making sure that something special was created," Amato said.

He added that for many students today, 9/11 is not a memory; it is history.

"A hundred million of those people, plus or minus, were not around or were too young to remember 9/11 25 years ago," said Dr. Steve Hodes, who arrived at Ground Zero just days after the attacks.

 25 years later, Kansan who lost legs in Afghanistan War reflects on 9/11 

Search dogs scoured through an unimaginable scene, often finding human remains instead of the people they were trained to rescue.

"There were roughly 300 plus search and rescue dogs between the World Trade Center site and the Pentagon," Hodes said. "When they were finding really nobody, the energy that they had to keep searching started to diminish."

Handlers even hid themselves in the debris so the dogs could find someone alive and

"They actually had to keep the dogs at task, focused at task, by hiding and giving them something to find because there was, frankly, almost no live survivors to be found," Hodes said.

 Kansas organization cleans up 9/11 memorial ahead of 25-year remembrance 

The part of 9/11 that Hodes wants people to remember is the memory of those who lost their lives on that tragic day.

"It's hard for me to grasp that a quarter of a century, 25 years later, I was asked to convey what I experienced," he said.

In a community more than a thousand miles from New York City, the memorial serves as a promise not to forget.

"This is the day that we want to remember forever, and this is one of the purposes of our promise of Rose Hill to not forget," Hodes said.

The memorial is located on the east side of School Street Pond in Rose Hill. Organizers invite everyone to attend the dedication ceremony on Friday at 10 a.m.

For more Kansas news, click here. Keep up with the latest breaking news by downloading our mobile app and signing up for our news email alerts. Sign up for our Storm Track 3 Weather app by clicking here. To watch our shows live on our website, click here.

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KSN-TV.