On Friday, victims’ families, first responders, and current and former government officials gathered at Lower Manhattan’s 9/11 Memorial to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks. With its immense pools and subterranean museum, the site was expensive (at around $1 billion), complex, and controversial. It’s become an important place of pilgrimage, but it is just one of thousands of 9/11 memorials scattered throughout the country.

Between 2009 and 2012, the Port Authority donated more than 1,800 beams and girders from the World Trade Center to communities in every state. This was a small fraction of the towers’ total structure, but enough to fill JFK Airport’s Hangar 17. Buckled columns and pieces of the distinctive arches had been stored after the attacks as evidence for a criminal prosecution that never materialized, and as an archive: the last physical record of two of the world’s most iconic buildings.

Many local memorials were built while the national ones — at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville — were still snagged in protracted disputes over design and funding. Far-flung communities commemorated the attacks because they had experienced them through television.

Even for those who had never set foot in New York, 9/11 was a collective national trauma. These horrifying and unreal events could be materialized through “relic” steel, and the steel’s passage through the country served as a kind of burial — for the buildings themselves, and, by proxy, for the more than 1,000 victims whose remains were never recovered.

Local memorials were built on budgets in the........

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