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Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Doug MacDougall felt like he needed to do something, even something small. A few days later, he found a large American flag and hung it up at the entrance of the Community Center.

Over the course of the month, MacDougall, who led the Weston Recreation Department for more than a quarter-century, said countless residents thanked him for the show of solidarity, leading him to think about how he could do more.

One large flag soon became thousands of smaller ones, and the next year he decided to plant one flag on the Town Green for each of the attacks’ 2,977 victims. A ceremony on the attack’s anniversary, MacDougall said, would begin with a toll of the First Parish Church’s bell at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

Twenty-five years later, the tradition remains as strong as ever.

“People just thought that was really powerful,” MacDougall said of the first ceremony. “It’s gone on to be something that Weston is very proud of.”

It took MacDougall a lot of planning to pull the first ceremony together. He said he began his initial planning in early 2002 by meeting with the town administrator, who gave him the go-ahead. The next – and more difficult step – was securing 3,000 American flags in a time when “people were buying them up for their own yards.” After some searching, he found a Massachusetts-based vendor that gave the town the flags at a discount.

MacDougall explained the ceremony is more than just showing up with the flags and handing them out to residents. In July 2002, he and longtime Recreation Department maintenance worker Doug Campbell sat down to draw up a grid identifying where the flags would go. After months of planning, MacDougall and his crew took to the Town Green a day before the one-year anniversary of 9/11 to spray-paint the grid and drill holes in the ground.

After the first couple of years, MacDougall added flags honoring police and fire departments. Then, about five years after the inaugural ceremony, he had one final idea: the community should also place flags for the international citizens who were killed in the attacks.

Chris Fitzgerald, who succeeded MacDougall as recreation director in 2015, said his goal upon beginning his tenure in Weston was to “operate [the ceremony] the exact same way it has been operated.” Then, he said, two anonymous Weston families donated money to ensure the ceremony is held every year in perpetuity.

Fitzgerald said the pandemic forced temporary changes to the 19th anniversary ceremony in 2020, with residents having to pre-register for scheduled times to plant flags to limit the number of people gathered at once.

“That was quite the memory, but I was very proud that we were able to pull it off during that crazy time,” he said.

Fitzgerald said the 9/11 attacks are “still raw to a lot of people in town,” and the ceremony is an opportunity for them to come together.

“It’s a very somber event. It’s a very awakening event, but it’s one that everybody looks back on very emotionally…You can feel that somberness and you can feel people, even today, still dealing with what happened then,” Fitzgerald said. “The bell tolls, people go out and they start placing flags, and it’s amazing. It’s just very quiet, very respectful.”

Community solidarity, MacDougall said, is both the essence of the ceremony as well as how it came together in the first place. Without the help of town staff – including Campbell, who served the town for three decades before his death in 2023 – the Rotary Club of Weston & Wayland, the Weston Community League and Weston High School, among others, the ceremony never would have happened.

“Weston is special. They take care of their people, and they are proud of what they do,” MacDougall said. “I retired 11 years ago, and I started thinking about it two weeks ago, that I need to go back for the anniversary.”

This year’s ceremony begins at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 11, and the flags will remain on the Town Green for at least two weeks. Fitzgerald said a nondenominational invocation will be held to honor the 25th anniversary.