Nine people needed to get off a wrecked schooner. The surfboat couldn't reach them. The usual shore-based rescue gear wasn't going to work either.
So the men at Pea Island tied lines around two surfmen and sent them into the water.
October 11, 2026 marked 130 years since the rescue of the E.S. Newman, one of those North Carolina Coast stories that deserves more than a quick mention beside a lighthouse photograph. Every person aboard survived. The crew who brought them ashore waited a century for their Gold Lifesaving Medals.
The keeper knew this water
Richard Etheridge wasn't a stranger assigned to learn the Outer Banks from a chart. Born enslaved on Roanoke Island in 1842, he served in the Union Army during the Civil War and later worked as a fisherman, farmer, and inlet pilot. The National Park Service's history traces that working knowledge of the water into his lifesaving career.
In 1880, he became the first Black keeper of a U.S. Life-Saving Service station. White crew members refused to serve under him and resigned; Black surfmen filled the station's ranks. Pea Island became the service's only all-Black crew.
Etheridge expected his men to know their jobs. Drilling wasn't a ceremonial extra. It was preparation for the night when the equipment, weather, and available options all stopped cooperating.
A rope where the usual equipment failed
That night arrived on October 11, 1896. The three-masted E.S. Newman, bound from Providence, Rhode Island, to Norfolk, Virginia, was driven off course by a hurricane and grounded about two miles south of the station.
According to the Coast Guard Historian's Office, surfman Theodore Meekins spotted the distress signal and alerted Etheridge. The crew hauled its rescue equipment toward the wreck, but storm water covered the beach. There was no usable dry ground for the normal operation.
The National Park Service describes the lifeboat and Lyle gun as unusable in the conditions. The Lyle gun ordinarily fired a rescue line toward a stranded vessel. That system still needed somewhere to set up and work.
Etheridge turned to his crew. With lines securing the men to shore, pairs of surfmen went out to the wreck and brought people back through the breakers. They rotated through the work rather than asking one exhausted pair to do it all.
All nine aboard came ashore alive, including the captain's wife and young son. It was skilled work by men who had trained together, carried out when the coast offered them very little room for error.
The rescue was immediate. The medals weren't.
The Coast Guard identifies the seven lifesavers honored for the rescue: Richard Etheridge, Benjamin Bowser, Dorman Pugh, Theodore Meekins, Lewis Wescott, Stanley Wise, and William Irving.
They received the Gold Lifesaving Medal posthumously in 1996, a hundred years after the wreck. The Pea Island Preservation Society credits the long effort to obtain recognition to a 14-year-old girl, two authors, a congressman, and a Coast Guard officer.
That gap belongs in the story alongside the rescue. Pea Island's men were doing essential federal lifesaving work while Black Americans were denied basic rights. Remembering the result without remembering the men and the conditions they served under leaves too much out.
A small building worth stopping for
You don't have to leave this story in a book. The original station cookhouse survives as the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum in Manteo, on Roanoke Island. It was relocated and restored, and the museum opened in 2008.
The museum lists the original E.S. Newman signboard among its exhibits, along with a Lyle gun, photographs, and documents. Nearby, the Herbert M. Collins Boathouse holds a restored early-1900s Monomoy-type surfboat. Those objects give the story some useful scale: the boat, the line, the men expected to make them work.
The society lists its address as 622 Sir Walter Raleigh Street, Manteo. Check its website before making the trip for current opening details; the museum specifically lists an October 31 closure.
There are plenty of reasons to stop on the way to the beach. This one comes with seven names worth remembering.