Guest Blog Post by Eric Schwarz, Research Librarian
New Jersey Department of Transportation
Photo description: New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti presents Eric Schwarz with a plaque for his research leading to the addition of five names on the memorial wall. All photos in this article are courtesy of Glenn Catana, NJDOT Office of Communications.
Research and digitization work at the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) has opened up the opportunity to recognize road workers who died on the job many decades ago.
Like many other libraries, the NJDOT Research Library is:
Tragically, dozens of workers from the NJDOT and its predecessor, the New Jersey State Highway Department (NJSHD) have died while on the job and on the road. In 2000, the NJDOT erected an Employee Memorial wall with a plaque for each of the 32 employees known to have died under these circumstances. Over the years, four names were added, including those of employees who gave their lives in 2007 and 2010. This brought the pre-2023 total of known names to 36.
In early 2023, NJDOT Research Librarian Eric Schwarz found the names of five additional men who had sacrificed their lives, in an employee newspaper called The Highway, published from 1942 to 1950. These names were added to the wall during the NJDOT’s 23rd Annual Remembrance Ceremony and 22nd Anniversary of 9/11, held on September 11, 2023.
The Highway, and an older publication (The Highwayman, 1921-1922) were being held in the NJDOT’s Communications Office. Curiosity, establishing a good relationship with the Communications Office, a “cleanup campaign” of NJDOT offices, and the Transportation Research and Connectivity Pooled Fund were all factors contributing to the discovery of these five names, which were missing from the wall.
Over its eight years, The Highway published 80 issues, each four pages long. All it took to find the five missing names (Arthur Reinhardt, Walter Eckert, Jeremiah O’Brien, William Kays, and Joseph Platt) was reading through each of these issues.
Using the accounts from The Highway, supplemented by research using the New Jersey State Library’s newspaper databases and draft registration cards from the military records database Fold3, Eric pieced together the stories of these five men, their deaths, and their lives. He presented stories of these men, and of the archival and digitization work, as the keynote speaker at the 2023 remembrance ceremony.
The NJDOT unveiled its Employee Memorial on September 8, 2000, coincidentally about one year before the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11/01. Since 2001, the Employee Memorial has taken on additional meaning, and the ceremony has been held on or about September 11 each year since 2002. The ceremony also honors military personnel and veterans, law enforcement, and emergency responders from NJDOT and the New Jersey State Police.
Research continues to find additional employees of New Jersey’s Highway or Transportation departments who also sacrificed their lives on the job. Two of the main sources for this research are newspaper databases and the New Jersey Death Index.
Based on this work, Eric will present a poster at the TRB Annual Meeting on Jan. 8, 2024, “Discoveries in the First Year of New Jersey DOT’s Digitization Project.”
MORE ABOUT THE INTERNET ARCHIVE PROJECT AND THE NJDOT LIBRARY:
New Jersey is one of the partners in the Transportation Research and Connectivity Pooled Fund. This fund provides the money, and the framework, for the NJDOT Research Library’s collection in the Internet Archive.
As of November 22, 2023, there were 195 documents and 12 videos available in this collection. Highlights of the initial items posted to the NJDOT collection include: a 20-year video history of the Employee Memorial; a local TV documentary about a bridge restoration; monthly reports from 1956 to 1966; annual reports from 1939 to 1991; The First Five Years of the Garden State Parkway, 1954-1959; NJDOT’s 50th anniversary commemorative book from 2016; and some issues of The Highwayman (1921-1922). Issues of The Highway (1942-1950) and other employee publications will be posted in the next few months.
The NJDOT is working with its partner, the New Jersey State Library (NJSL), to catalog and index the Internet Archive documents in the NJSL’s DSpace archive. This archive, in turn, will feed into the DPLA via the DPLA’s New Jersey/Delaware Hub.
For a more complete account of the Remembrance Ceremony, and additional photos, please visit the NJDOT Technology Transfer website.
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