Foxborough 9/11 Memorial Earns Monument Co. Two Tribute

Visitors to Sharon's Rock Ridge Cemetery will find some of the memorials erected by Foxborough resident John Ricker's family firm here over the past 74 years.

Nearby, in Foxborough, Ricker's hometown, the "Foxboro Never Forgets, September 11 Memorial" earned the Morse and Beggs Monument Company two tributes recently.

The North Attleboro firm won the Best Public/Civic Monument and Biondon Bronze Bert Gast Memorial awards in the Monument Builders of North America's 2012 Design Contest. The honors were presented during the association's Joint Annual Meeting with the California Monument Association and the Pacific Northwest Monument Builders Association, held Feb. 24 to Feb. 26 in San Diego, Calif.

About 90 projects were entered in the Best Public/Civic Monument contest, Ricker told Sharon Patch during a recent interview at Rock Ridge.

"It feels really good. It feels like an accomplishment," said Ricker, who joined the firm in 1989.

"My father-in-law, who ran the business until about 2005, had done many war memorials of this size. This is the first time I've done something of this magnitude."

Located at the Foxborough Public Safety Building on Chestnut Street, , the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Foxborough resident Michael McGinty and were among the victims.

Ricker said Foxborough presented a concept for the memorial, which Morse and Beggs then designed.

"They wanted to have a walkway going into an area, and possibly having something to look like the towers," recalled Ricker, a Foxborough resident.

"The first thing we made, they said,'That's it. That's what we envisioned.'"

Ricker said it was the second Sept. 11 memorial he had done. A North Attleboro Eagle Scout project was the first.