When the Columbine Memorial is completed this fall, it will join hundreds of memorials across the United States ranging from simple plaques to towers hundreds of feet tall.
However, University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Kenneth Foote says that while memorials like the one honoring the Columbine victims are becoming more common, it hasn't always been that way.
"We see these very big memorials now but, in fact, that's a relatively rare outcome," Foote said. "It's more common for a lot of these sites to fade away. Many of the sites are often just reused, or if they are associated with really shocking events like gangland killings or mass murders, it is not uncommon for the evidence to be wiped clean."
A professor in CU-Boulder's geography department, Foote has visited hundreds of sites that have been scarred by violence or tragedy in the United States and abroad, and is the author of the book "Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy."
He became interested in studying memorial sites during a 1980s visit to Salem, Mass. While there, he was surprised to find at that time no memorial site or markers associated with the Salem witch trials, a significant chapter in early U.S. colonial history and in Salem's history.
"In some cases people put up very powerful memorials and shrines and in other cases, like Salem, people didn't want to be reminded, so they just distanced themselves from it," Foote said. "A major memorial was not dedicated until 1992, 300 years after the killings."
In general, public memorials are created to act as a reminder of a tragic event or because an event has an important moral or ethical lesson that needs to be preserved, Foote says. War memorials, as well as memorials for heroes or victims, such as President John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, also are common. However, memorials marking the sites of tragic murders haven't been common until fairly recently, Foote says.
The manner in which the public has dealt with scenes of mass murder began to change after a shooting at a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif. in 1984, where 21 people were shot and killed before police killed the shooter, according to Foote.
"Up until that point these kinds of mass murders and terrorist attacks were considered shameful or shocking. They were things that people didn't really want to remember," Foote said. "So there was a real tendency to remove all the evidence. The murder at that McDonald's restaurant was the first case I could find in the United States where this sort of awful event resulted in a small community memorial.
"If the Columbine shooting would have occurred 20 years ago, most likely there would have been a great effort to wipe away all evidence," Foote said.
One of the difficult things about creating the Columbine Memorial and other memorials honoring the victims of mass murders is that the killers are often part of the community, according to Foote.
"It is a very difficult process because it's very hard to separate the victim from the perpetrator," Foote said. "So it causes a lot of tension because, how can you honor the victims without somehow calling attention to the fact that the killers were right there in their midst?"
Once completed, however, memorials are often therapeutic to the community.
"They are a way for the community to come together after a tragedy, to share some of the grief and loss, to do something positive," Foote said. "So it's a way for people to say, 'This event has occurred but now we're going to come together and work as a group to put up a memorial and have a dedication and, also, it's important for the community because it gives people something to rally around."
It's hard to tell who will visit the memorial, if visitors will be mostly from the local community or whether the memorial may become a spiritual destination or pilgrimage site, according to Foote.
"These sites are visited by a wide range of individuals, and for very different reasons," Foote said. "They are places that people feel very strongly attached to, even 100 years later. I've been surprised in my travels how some of these sites from the 18th and 19th centuries still are attracting very committed pilgrims who really want to come because it is where some event occurred that was very important to their family or to U.S. history."