In a flash of red, white and blue flowers, a group of Katahdin-area students filled 20 barrels with trailing vinca, deep red geraniums and purple and white petunias for Memorial Day.
As part of a National Honor Society service project, the 11 Katahdin Middle/High School students spent Thursday placing the vibrant annuals into fresh potting soil before watering and delivering the remembrance planters under American flags rimming Patten’s downtown area.
It was graduating senior Emma Schmidt’s third time planting and distributing the flower barrels.
“Memorial Day is a day to honor and remember people who sacrificed so much for our country so that we can live the way that we live,” said Schmidt, who is also president of the local honor society. “They sacrificed their lives and the lives they had to come home to so that we can live the way we live. And I think it’s important that we remember how lucky we are.”
For the past 11 years, the honor society students have planted the flower barrels, said former principal Rae Bates, who got the program going her last year at the high school.
“My husband and I go north to Fort Kent to visit relatives of his, and a lot of these little towns had these lovely flower barrels just like Houlton does,” Bates said. “I said to Rowena Harvey, who is the national honor society and chemistry teacher at Katahdin, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we did that with kids? They could plant, have a lesson and do something for the community.’”
And that’s how the annual tradition began.
“It’s a really special thing to be out here doing this with everybody,” said another senior, Josh Martin, who will graduate in early June. “It’s a really good group of kids that we have here today.”
Harvey, who has been working with the students for the annual Memorial Day planting since its inception, said service to the community is one of the four pillars of the honor society.
The students all gathered at Bates’ Patten home to plant the barrels on Thursday while she demonstrated how to place them in the pots.
While working, several of the students mentioned Dustin Harris, who graduated from Katahdin High School in 2002. After graduation he attended Eastern Maine Community College for two years, studying diesel mechanics before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 2004.
Spc. Harris was assigned to Fort Wainwright, in Fairbanks, Alaska with the 172nd Brigade Support Battalion, and 101st Airborne Division Air Assault as a heavy-wheeled vehicle operator. He attended Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia where he qualified as a paratrooper. In 2005 he was deployed to Mosul, Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom in support of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
While on patrol on April 6, 2006, Harris was killed by an improvised explosive device in Bayji, Iraq.
Harris is buried at home in Patten, where the honor society students have also placed wreaths on his grave as part of their Wreaths Across America service work.
Six of the students planting the memorial flower barrels also visited the organization’s wreath-making facility in Columbia Falls in November.
While there, they walked the woods among the birch tipping grounds where materials are harvested for the wreaths. As part of their visit, the students and Harvey placed memorial dog tags on remembrance trees while saying the names of the fallen soldiers.
“We did over 100 tags that day,” Harvey said.
Senior Chandler Smith said that Dustin Harris’ mother, Lorna Harris, was at the tipping grounds, and she showed the students Dustin’s remembrance tree.
“They gave us dog tags to put on the tree, and we would read off their name and their rank,” Smith said. “We read it out loud to celebrate their life.”
