“People can actually go up to this piece of steel and touch it and reflect on where they were 10 years ago,” Chief Bob Parnell said Friday.

The steel beam will be dedicated in a Sunday ceremony, one of countless observances across North Carolina scheduled that day to commemorate the events of Sept. 11 in ways as diverse as the state itself.

The North Carolina Symphony plans a special concert in Raleigh, during which selections from Mozart’s “Requiem” will be played, along with a composition based on a Toni Morrison poem about the attacks. Volunteers in Charlotte have arranged 2,997 flags in the shape of the World Trade Center towers. A church in Louisburg is planning a 24-hour prayer session, and all the state’s flags are to be flown at half-staff.

Such commemorations will be virtually everywhere in the U.S. this weekend, a somber anniversary even in communities that didn’t suffer a direct loss that day.

“Even if it’s not a direct connection in terms of losing a family member or a friend, it was a defining moment in our nation’s history,” said Caroline Janney, a historian at Purdue University who studies American memory and memorials. “Fundamentally, it changed the way we think about who we are as Americans.”

Some of the most emotional moments are likely to happen in towns like Salisbury, where pieces of wreckage salvaged from the World Trade Center will be unveiled as stark reminders of the carnage.

“Some people climb the steps and touch the steel, some just kind of step back and they’re not sure they want to get so close,” Parnell said of the beam in Salisbury. That piece of steel bears spray-painted markings that a visiting New York firefighter said probably meant search and rescue crews combing the wreckage thought bodies lay underneath.

“That meant a lot to the firefighters here,” Parnell said.

Another piece of World Trade Center steel in Salisbury will eventually become part of the entrance at the planned firefighter training facility at Rowan Cabarrus Community College, while the Never Forget Trailer may get a permanent location.

Another piece of steel from the ruins already has already found that along the coast in a military town. A 10,000-pound beam was recently delivered to Havelock, home of Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, where it will form the centerpiece of a monument being designed by architect Lee Dixon of Morehead City. On Sunday, a dedication will be held at the site of the monument, which has a special significance for Dixon.

“I was one of the North Carolina Baptist Men who volunteered to go there and help after the attacks,” he said Friday. “It brought back so many emotions that I thought were deep down and hidden.”

The proliferation of memorials incorporating material salvaged from the World Trade Center — there are hundreds at various stages of development across the country, and at least half a dozen in North Carolina — is similar to how previous generations gradually changed their commemoration of the Civil War, 19th-century America’s worst trauma, Janney said. As the years went by and successive generations were born without direct ties to the war, permanent physical reminders of the conflict became more common.

“We have to start thinking about how we’re going to teach this history to the next generation, and one of the strongest ways you can teach someone is to show them a relic or a piece of material from the event,” she said.

That’s why the monument Dixon designed is in a circular shape with the words “We Shall Never Forget” prominently displayed: to symbolize the perpetual significance of Sept. 11, not just for those who remember that day, but for future generations as well, Dixon said.

“A circle never ends, it goes on for eternity,” he said. “And our memories, that ‘We Shall Never Forget,’ will go on forever.”