She admired NCDOT memorial to workers killed on the job, then noticed something missing
Kathy McGee Sledge was on her way to Tennessee with her grandson when they stopped at a highway rest area off Interstate 40 west of Winston-Salem. There, outside the restrooms, she noticed for the first time the N.C. Department of Transportation memorial listing the names of employees killed on the job.
Then she noticed something was missing.
“I looked on the board, and I’m like, wow, this is really nice,” Sledge said. “Well, I kept looking and looking and looking. My grandson looked at me and he said, “What’s wrong. I know there’s something wrong.’ And I said, ‘I don’t see granddad’s name.’”
A search for information about missing names
Sledge’s grandfather was Mack Thomas Batchelor Jr. In 1975, he and two other NCDOT employees had just finished lunch and were pulling onto N.C. 97 on the Nash County side of Rocky Mount when their dump truck was hit by a tractor-trailer hauling bricks.
The force of the collision knocked the dump truck 200 feet. Batchelor was thrown from the truck, while the boots he was wearing were still in the cab. He and the two other men, Charlie Daniel Eatmon and Charles Grey Lewis, were killed, as was the driver of the tractor-trailer, Robert Doby of Albemarle.
There were 113 names on the NCDOT memorials, dating back to 1959, and Batchelor, Eatmon and Lewis were not among them. Sledge tracked down a man at NCDOT associated with the memorial program and sent him an email about the omission. Two days later, she got a call from Debbie Leonard, the safety engineer for NCDOT’s Division 4, which includes Nash County.
Leonard went looking for information about the accident, but initially came up dry. Personnel records from the 1970s are gone, and no one in the maintenance barns or other offices of NCDOT remembered three men dying in Nash County. Leonard even went looking for the state trooper who reportedly handled the wreck, but he died last year.
Then she found someone with a scrapbook with old newspaper clippings from the Rocky Mount and Nashville newspapers that provided details, including how the men had been working on a construction project several miles away and had just finished eating at a roadside grill.
Sledge had been dubious about how the state bureaucracy would respond to her complaint. But in early September, less than a month after Sledge fired off that first email, Leonard called to say the names would be added to the memorials found in 59 rest areas across the state.
“I figured it was going to be a fight,” Sledge said. “But it was one of the most pleasant experiences, to fix a bad thing.”
NCDOT acknowledges and fixes its mistake
On Tuesday, NCDOT held a brief ceremony at the Nash County rest area on northbound I-95. Sledge and other members of the men’s families were given plaques and folded U.S. flags that had flown over the division’s office in Wilson.
“It was something that was unfortunately missed in the past,” said Keith Eason, the top engineer in Division 4. “We’re thankful for the opportunity to fix it.”
Charlie Eatmon’s son Pete collected the plague and flag for his father. Pete Eatmon said his father was 64 when he died and had worked for NCDOT about 10 years, after a lifetime of farming. Eatmon, who lives on the family land outside Bailey, said he didn’t know about the NCDOT memorials or that his father’s name would be added until about a week ago.
“It brings back bad memories,” he said. “It was a tough time.”
Sledge, who lives in Archer Lodge, was 17 when her grandfather was killed. She remembers the communities of Middlesex and Bailey rallying around the families of the three men with food and support.
There are now 116 names on the NCDOT memorials. When Sledge learned her grandfather’s name had been added, she drove to the rest area on I-95 to see for herself.
“I was just — I can’t even explain it,” she said when asked what it meant to her. “It’s like 50 years, they finally come home and found a place of recognition.”
