The events of November 18, 1999, were devastating to the community of Texas A & M University, College Station.  Since 1908, Aggie students had expressed team spirit aimed at championing defeat over rival University of Texas at Austin by building and igniting a Bonfire every year around Thanksgiving.  In 1999, the event turned into a tragedy as fifty-eight students were building the colossal structure for the Bonfire from an estimated five thousand logs. At 2:42 a.m., the fifty-nine-foot log structure began to collapse, killing twelve of the students working on it and injuring another twenty-seven.

The university responded to the tragedy by ending the annual event (a variation of it currently occurs off-campus) and holding an international blind design competition for a memorial. In making what would become the winning proposal, Overland Partners sought to balance the memorializing of loss  with recognition of the Bonfire as one of the university’s most cherished traditions. They also proposed locating the memorial on the exact spot where the accident took place.

Seeking to create a monument in which every element has symbolic meaning, the Overland team plotted out the memorial into distinct sections arranged like a procession, with each area having its own meaning and purpose. Visitors to the memorial begin at Tradition Plaza, an arrival area where they are greeted by a stone wall engraved with the epic poem, “The Last Corps Trip,” which was traditionally recited before the lighting of each year’s Bonfire. The poem describes St. Peter greeting Aggies at Heaven’s gate and is uncannily prophetic of the tragedy.

The second section, History Walk, is a long walkway that functions as a timeline made up of eighty-nine blocks of granite, with a notch cut into each stone at a point that is 11/12ths of its width, to represent November, the 11th month of the year and the time of the event.  At nighttime, the notches are illuminated to represent the lighting of the Bonfire.  For historical accuracy, blocks representing 1955, 1982, and 1996 include plaques memorializing students killed on Bonfire-related accidents in those years. To mark the year 1963, a low black slab with the year inscribed on it was substituted because President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of that year, and the Bonfire stack was respectfully disassembled log by log.

At the end of the timeline is the Spirit Ring, composed of twenty-seven granite blocks, each representing one of the injured survivors, and connected by twelve sixteen-foot-tall portals, each dedicated to a student who died and positioned in alignment with the student’s home town. 170 feet in diameter, the dimension of the fence that was traditionally constructed around the Bonfire, the ring symbolizes school spirit by referring to class rings, which are an intrinsic part of the Aggie culture, and to the crowds of students who gathered around the fence each year to watch the Bonfire. To pay tribute to the injured, each granite block houses a bronze plaque, but these plaques were left blank to honor the larger group of everyone injured during the Bonfire’s ninety-year history.

For the interior of the portals, the Overland team chose bronze instead of granite, since the material has a warmer, softer touch to it and is thus more appropriate for remembering the human presence of those being memorialized. With the aid of bronze artists, the interiors of the portals were embellished with medallions engraved with portraits of each of the deceased, accompanied by their signatures and their own thoughts or remembrances of them written by others.

The final element in the memorial is a black granite marker. Located on the exact place of the Bonfire stack’s Centerpole, it is engraved with the date and time that the pole collapsed (11-18-1999 2:42 a.m.), in the innermost area accessible only through one of the portals.