Keepers, Surfmen, Wives, and Daughters: A Study of the Men, Women, and Families of the United States Life-Saving Service in North Carolina

by Tammy Woodward

Little Kinnakeet Life-Saving Station, Hatteras Island, Outer Banks, Undated, H. H. Brimley Collection, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

The Outer Banks of North Carolina is both a beautiful and dangerous place. Its chain of windswept barrier islands stretches from the coastline of Virginia south to Cape Lookout. Its waters contain the ghostly graves of an estimated 3,000 shipwrecks spanning four centuries as a result of horrific storms, shifting sands, and dangerous shoals.  

The United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS), which operated between 1871 and 1915, is a history that is near and dear to the Outer Banks community. The region is filled with descendants of the Keepers and Surfmen who once manned the USLSS stations that the federal government built along America’s coastlines. Lifesaving stations were a government solution to the growing public outcry over the staggering number of deaths by shipwreck, often happening within yards of the beach, during the early nineteenth century. After a long legislative battle and a particularly infamous year of shipwrecks between 1870-1871, Congress appropriated funds to create the United States Life-Saving Service under the Department of the Treasury and placed the enigmatic, forward-thinking Sumner L. Kimball in charge of its administration. By the turn of the next century, 279 lifesaving stations dotted the Atlantic, Pacific, and Great Lakes coasts.[1] The USLSS was a government success story that saved thousands of lives until its eventual merge with the United States Revenue Cutter Service to form the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915. It also left an indelible legacy among the coastal towns and communities of America’s coastline.

Surfmen deploy their surfboat wearing cork vests in response to a rescue, Undated, Charles Evans Collection, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

The coast of North Carolina once hosted a chain of twenty-nine lifesaving stations crewed by the bravest of men who fostered close-knit coastal communities of hardy families. Each station employed a Keeper and six Surfmen ranked one through six according to experience. These men formed a new breed of masculinity that was founded on bravery, selflessness, and physical endurance that sparked a national following in the popular press of their brave deeds and heroic rescues. Headlines read, "Real Men in the Life-Saving Service," who created "the best of the schools in which men are made."[2] They embodied the myth of lifesaving: “they had to go out, they did not have to come back” that is still used by the Coast Guard today.[3] What is lesser known is the distinguished role their wives, sisters, sweethearts, and daughters played in the benevolent mission of lifesaving or the kinship networks that formed around station life in these isolated, coastal communities.

While the Life-Saving Service has fostered a small but detailed historiography, its focus has largely been on adventure stories of dramatic shipwrecks and rescues; the military-style training, drills, surfboats, and beach apparatus employed by the crews; the unique architecture of station buildings; and the legislative battles fought in Congress to grow and expand the service. This dissertation will not recount the history of the USLSS, at least no more than is necessary to understand its distinct origins. Rather, this study will explore an uncharted story of the lifesaving service that no historian has yet to consider.

Nags Head Life-Saving Station, Outer Banks, ca. 1910, Rennie Fuqua Photographs Collection, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

The purpose of this dissertation is to reexamine the United States Life-Saving Service using a gendered lens to measure the men, and the women and families who served alongside them, who chose this honored way of life and whose impact left an indelible stamp in the coastal communities they fostered along North Carolina’s Outer Banks. This gender history will focus on traits like bravery, hardship, and sacrifice that compelled these men, with the cooperation and support of their women, to routinely rescue distressed mariners in turbulent seas off America's shores as both an occupation and a calling. This research will show how the men who joined the lifesaving service created a unique code of coastal manhood that transformed into something different from nineteenth-century gender ideologies. These men risked their lives daily to undertake a dangerous but humanitarian mission. This research will show how their efforts impacted the development of the isolated communities along the Outer Banks and sparked national sensationalism of their daring rescues in newspapers across the country. This study will explore how the crucial support roles that women played outside of the service impacted its development. It will also show how the early integration of the USLSS that saw fathers, sons, brothers, and uncles, Black and White, serving together created tight-knit kinship networks that still exist today.

When wrecks were close enough to shore, Surfmen used a Lyle Gun to deploy a line to the ship to allow a breeches buoy to carry distressed mariners over the water to the beach, Undated, Charles Evans Collection, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

This study will investigate how the social constructs of manhood among the Keepers and Surfmen who joined the service and manned these lifesaving stations took on a regional identity very different than those in the American South. Scholars of southern manhood often define characteristics of masculinity along occupational, class, and racial divides. The latter nineteenth century experienced a major turning point in national definitions of manhood as a result of the Civil War. This study will explore how masculinity, along with social characteristics like class and race among the men of the USLSS and the communities that formed around lifesaving stations, took on a regionalized identity as traditional southern manhood blurred in the occupation of shipwreck rescues along the remote beaches of North Carolina. Did these social ideals develop simply out of a shortage of available men among isolated beach communities, or were they unique to the individuals who settled on the coast and braved the weather and sea to serve under the USLSS?

Keeper Richard Etheridge and the Surfmen of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station, the first African American lifesaving crew in the USLSS, Outer Banks, ca. 1880, H. H. Brimley Collection, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

Despite their continuous presence in the archival record, women’s contributions to the Life-Saving Service have seen little attention within the historiography. Women's and Gender historians have thus far ignored these historical actors and their significance to lifesaving. The records of the USLSS describe women backfilling surfmen’s roles at the stations while the men spent hours and even days on the water responding to a wreck, and yet little has been written about them. This research will fill that gap to show how wives and daughters augmented the men’s roles out of necessity and crossed traditional gender barriers to fulfill a shared mission of saving distressed mariners imperiled by the sea. While the U.S. Lighthouse Service employed women as Lighthouse Keepers in the nineteenth century, the Life-Saving Service never formally hired women as Keepers or Surfmen; they served strictly in a volunteer capacity. The wives of lifesavers formed the volunteer organization known as the Women’s National Relief Association that employed newspaper advertisements to solicit donations of clothing, food, and necessities for the shipwrecked victims the surfmen rescued. The nineteenth century experienced a major turning point in women’s organizing for charitable causes, so this study will situate how women used this national platform to benefit the lifesaving stations within that broader context. These efforts were supported and documented on shipwreck reports and in the annual reports of the Life-Saving Service, so they were clearly sanctioned by its headquarters. At least, that is what this study hopes to discover.

The Women's National Relief Association published newspaper advertisements across the country to recruit volunteer aid like clothing, necessities, medicines, and books to be sent to lifesaving stations to resupply those rescued from shipwrecks who lost their possessions. “The Perils of the Coast,” New York Times, January 8, 1882.

In addition to men’s service and women’s volunteership in the USLSS, this study will address a lesser-known component of the lifesavers, that of the kinship networks that formed among lifesaving station communities. In nearly all stations across the country, Keepers and Surfmen served in a multi-generational capacity with common surnames emerging among the crew lists and sons serving under fathers and uncles or intermarrying with nearby station families. Although the historiography alludes to the lifesaving service as a family business, this research will seek to discover whether this phenomenon was simply based on a lack of prospects or if it was a higher calling that was passed down from generation to generation. Primary evidence suggests the latter simply based on the number of descendants of the USLSS crewmen who served in the Coast Guard.  

Overall, this research will investigate how nineteenth-century ideologies of masculinity and femininity were transformed under the Life-Saving Service’s culture and policies to foster nationally-recognized heroism, sacrifice, and survival within the isolated beach communities and unpredictable weather of the North Carolina coast. The result was a dramatic decrease in lives lost to shipwrecks along America’s shores. This study will marry the history of the Life-Saving Service through its government records with new research using a variety of uncharted archives of the Outer Banks like oral histories, local family papers, and local station records to define coastal ideologies of manliness, nontraditional womanhood, and kinship roles in the Life-Saving Service to bring to life the men who fulfilled the role of lifesaver and honor their lived experiences that sparked a national following and a century of adventure stories.

While horses were a rare commodity among lifesaving stations, those that did have them used them to help pull the beach apparatus and surfboats down the beach toward a wreck. When horses were unavailable, the men harnessed themselves to the cart to move it down the beach. "Life-Saving Crew on Way to Wreck with Breeches-Buoy Apparatus," Undated, National Park Service Photographs, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

Tammy Woodward is a resident of the Outer Banks in North Carolina and a doctoral candidate in the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in American History program at Liberty University. She is the Director of the Outer Banks History Center, the eastern branch of the State Archives of North Carolina. She also serves on the board of directors for the Outer Banks Coast Guard History Preservation Group, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that aims to preserve the surviving lifesaving stations of the Outer Banks.

Bibliography

Carol Cronk Cole Collection. AV.5138. Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina, Manteo, North Carolina.

Charles Evans Collection. AV.5205.3. Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina, Manteo, North Carolina.

H. H. Brimley Collection. AV.5197. Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina, Manteo, North Carolina.

Mobley, Joe A. Ship Ashore!: The U.S. Lifesavers of Coastal North Carolina. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History, 1994.

National Parks Service Photographs. AV.5178. Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina, Manteo, North Carolina.

“The Perils of the Coast,” New York Times, January 8, 1882. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Rennie Fuqua United States Lifesaving Service Photographs Collection.AV.5188. Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina.

Shanks, Ralph, and Wick York, The U.S. Life-Saving Service: Heroes, Rescues, and Architecture of the Early Coast Guard. Novato, CA: Costano Books, 2004.

“Winning the Badge of Courage, Real Men of the Life-Saving Service Who Got the Coveted Treasury Medal.” The Morning Telegraph, 1911. Clipping. John F. Wilson IV Papers. PC.5359. Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina, Manteo, NC.

[1] “Winning the Badge of Courage, Real Men of the Life-Saving Service Who Got the Coveted Treasury Medal,” The Morning Telegraph, 1911, Clipping, John F. Wilson IV Papers, Outer Banks History Center, State Archives of North Carolina, Manteo, NC.

[2] Joe A. Mobley, Ship Ashore!: The U.S. Lifesavers of Coastal North Carolina (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History, 1994), 7.

[3] Ralph Shanks and Wick York, The U.S. Life-Saving Service: Heroes, Rescues, and Architecture of the Early Coast Guard (Novato, CA: Costano Books, 2004), 17.