Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Life Saving Station

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - SiriusXM and Atlas Obscura

This episode explores the remarkable story of Richard Etheridge, an African American man who led the all-Black Pea Island Life Saving Station in North Carolina. Despite racial barriers and sabotage, his crew executed one

Key takeaways

• First Black station keeper in U.S. Life-Saving Service

Transcript preview

If you drive down the coast of the outer banks in North Carolina, you get to a point where you get the feeling you're going nowhere. You're on a single lane road, and civilization just starts to disappear. There's fewer and fewer houses, no more restaurants. Sand to the left, sand to the right, with just a few beach grasses poking through. This is P-island. Today, it is a wildlife refuge. one of the most untouched parts of the outer banks. And out here you will see a sign. It's nothing special. All it says is the name of a bridge, Captain Richard Etheridge Bridge. It's the kind of sign you might just drive past without even thinking about it. But there is a story behind that sign. A hundred years ago, this small piece of land and the outer banks was the site of one of the most amazing water rescues ever. And it was led by a... person and a team who until recently were mostly unknown. I'm Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today's episode is brought to you in partnership with the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau. Today's story is about how just 30 years after the Civil War ended, a man led one of the most successful life-saving teams in the country's history. And how their incredible rescue required them to go off book? That's after this. houses for rent right on the ocean. But in the late 1800s, the Outer Banks was a different world. They thought of the beachfront as like wasteland. They thought of the beachfront as a place you wouldn't want to live. This is Dave Zobe. He's a writer and he used to visit the Outer Banks as a kid with his family during the summer. The Outer Banks, if you don't know them, are a series of barrier islands, which means they're basically a long strip of sand that runs parallel to the actual coastline. like this outer buffer zone between the coast and the Atlantic Ocean. Which means, especially back in the day, things could get rough. It was a hard place to live, you know. There was a malaria, there was storms, there was blowing sand. Before the bridges were built, the only way to get out there was by boat. But the sandy strip of land was always shifting. And in the days before radar, sailors couldn't see them. or see when a storm was approaching. So there were ships driven ashore. You know, sometimes they found dead bodies on the beach because people washed up. Sometimes 300 people would lose their lives. The only metaphor we could come up with is maybe the analogy would be a modern plane crash. At one point, there were these two big disasters that really got people's attention. The first was in 1877 when a ship named the Huron sank just 200 yards off the north. line of shore, 98 out of 134 people on board died. Less than two months later, another ship called the metropolis went down. Another 85 people died. That's when the story of how dangerous the outer banks were got out. Because the newspapers loved that kind of sensationalism and they sent newspaper men down from Norfolk and they got to the beaches in time to see people digging the graves. So it was really grisly and the country was paying attention. And when the country started paying attention to these disasters, they said these deaths didn't need to happen. We needed to do something about all these Americans just drowning right there within sight of the coast. So Congress established a rescue service called the life-saving service, basically a precursor to the Coast Guard. They built life-saving stations along the coast and staffed them nine months out of the year. Crews came from the mainland to live and work at these stations. One of those stations was on that empty strip of land that land that is now a wildlife sanctuary. P