LEWISTON – Before the panels with all those names rose up, creating a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial overlooking the Androscoggin River, a solemn object needed burying.

The relic: a Purple Heart earned by Medal of Honor recipient Thomas McMahon.

McMahon’s brother, Michael, placed the heart inside the wooden foundation of the replica, at the meeting point of the wall’s two wings.

The medal will reside there until Sunday afternoon, when the traveling wall moves on.

Why? Tradition.

As the story goes, when the foundation was poured for the original wall in Washington, a vet pitched his medal into the hardening concrete.

“This wall needs a heart,” he said.

McMahon, a Lewiston native who was killed in Vietnam on March 19, 1969, will be the replica’s heart for its stay.

The wall is scheduled to open to the public Friday at sunrise.

In the meantime, volunteers will erect 48 panels, landscape around them and put up lights, computers, chairs and sound equipment for the thousands of people who will likely visit.

“When we’re done setting up, it will look like it’s been here forever,” said Michael Martel of the Fortin Group, a local funeral company that helped bring the wall to Lewiston. The wall is owned by Dignity Memorial, a national network of funeral homes.

The replica arrived in Lewiston on Sunday, escorted into the city by more than 1,000 motorcyclists.

The panel assembly began Monday morning with a crew of about 50, including people from Auburn Public Works and Seabees from Brunswick Naval Air Station.

Today, workers plan to complete the assembly and spread several truckloads of mulch around the wall. Then they’ll begin setting up the computers that visitors can use to look up individual names on the wall.

The first official visitors are scheduled to be children.

Fifth- and sixth-graders from Lewiston’s public elementary schools are scheduled to visit Thursday morning along with the entire student body of McMahon Elementary, which got its name from the man whose medal is buried beneath the apex.

The medal is one of several in a glass case kept in the school lobby, including the rare blue ribbon with gold stars of the Medal of Honor.

One of the stories will likely be of McMahon’s courage. He was a 20-year-old medic trying to carry injured comrades to safety was he was killed.

His name is one of 58,256 on the wall.

“There will be Vietnam veterans here to answer all their questions,” said Martel, who estimated that more than 1,500 children will visit Thursday.

On Thursday afternoon, the wall will be open for people with disabilities and people from nursing homes and veterans homes.

The wall will open to the public at dawn Friday and will stay open around the clock until 3:30 p.m. Sunday.