On October 25, 2017, a dedication ceremony was held for a memorial commemorating West Virginia state highway employees who have lost their lives in work zone collisions. The creation of this memorial was spearheaded by the West Virginia Division of Highways (WVDOH), the largest agency of the West Virginia Department of Transportation (WVDOT). The WVDOH Fallen Worker Memorial is located at the Interstate 77 (I-77) welcome center in the city of Williamstown in the northwestern part of the Mountain State.
The impetus for the establishment of this memorial in the first place can be traced to members of the WVDOH District 3 staff who initially were seeking to honor a deceased fellow employee. The employee was Randall W. Bland, who lost his life while doing his job in a work zone in June 2015. The trouble began when a tanker truck slammed into another motor vehicle in the vicinity, thereby causing a chain reaction of vehicles colliding with each other. One of those other vehicles fatally struck Bland as he was running to help people involved in that series of crashes. He was only 49 years old at the time.
Since there was not any type of memorial to honor those who died while performing their jobs in work zones in West Virginia, those District 3 employees were ultimately tasked to come up with a statewide monument paying tribute to not only their own fallen colleague Bland but numerous other individuals who similarly sacrificed their lives over the years. The District 3 employees involved in the development of such a memorial were John Buck, Jake Bumgarner, Candy Caviness, Neil Reed, and Kevin Reynolds. Those assisting them in this project included both Randy Damron and Carrie Jones on behalf of the WVDOT office of communications.
A key part of this committee’s efforts involved requesting proposed sketches for the memorial from WVDOH employees across the state. A total of 20 entries were subsequently received. The winning one was submitted by Marshall Snyder, a WVDOH District 7 bridge inspector.
Snyder proposed a statue of a WVDOH worker holding a traffic cone in one hand and a stop sign in the other. The person awarded the contract for turning this idea into full-fledged reality was the versatile artist Jamie Lester of the Morgantown-based firm Vandalia Bronze. Lester’s other West Virginia-based sculptures have included statues of actor Don Knotts and basketball player Jerry West in Morgantown. In addition, Lester designed the obverse side of the West Virginia quarter that was issued as of part of the U.S. Mint’s 50 State commemorative quarters issued between 1997 and 2008. (Lester’s design for the West Virginia quarter featured the New River Gorge Bridge in the southern area of the state.)
The unveiling of this Fallen Worker Memorial statue on a Wednesday in 2017 proved to be an occasion for both celebrating and mourning the lives of those who had been killed in work zones. “This represents a necessary and permanent way to pay tribute to those employees who lost their lives while improving the safety of our roads and bridges,” said Tom Smith, who served as secretary of WVDOT from 2017 to 2019, during the ceremony. “We all have a role to play, by slowing down and staying alert in work zones, to make sure no more names are etched into this memorial.”
The numerous other people attending this event included Bland’s widow Tracey. “It’s [an] awesome tribute to the fallen workers and my husband,” she tearfully stated. She also expressed her heartfelt wish “that people would slow down in the work areas and remember that the workers do have families.”
At the time of the memorial’s formal introduction to the public, there were a total of 49 names of fallen workers etched into the bronze base of the statue. The other individuals immortalized there in the years since then have included employees whose tragic deaths occurred as far back as the 20th century. One of these workers is Jack A. Williams, the victim of a hit-and-run accident while he was flagging traffic in a work zone on a bridge during the early 1980s. Another person whose name can now likewise can be seen at the memorial is Richard Johnson, who was killed while operating a snowplow for the West Virginia State Road Commission (a predecessor of WVDOT) in February 1947.
The Fallen Worker Memorial continues to be a major gathering space for honoring such people during National Work Zone Awareness Week each year in April. The attached photo of the memorial was taken in 2024, and it also shows several traffic cones — each clad in safety vests and topped with hardhats — representing WVDOH employees who died in the line of duty. Along with serving as a permanent fixture at the I-77 Williamstown Welcome Center, that statue has also been replicated in miniature form. Those small-scale versions have been installed in several other highway welcome centers throughout the state.
Photo Credit: West Virginia Department of Transportation
For more information on the WVDOH Fallen Worker Memorial, please check out https://transportation.wv.gov/communications/PressRelease/Pages/DOH-Unveils-Fallen-Worker-Memorial.aspx
A video of the dedication ceremony for this memorial can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9L7DOxLyQ
Transportation History 
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