Pea Island's Richard Etheridge - keeper of the island's rescue station for 20 years - North Carolina's African-American Culture: Advertising Travel Supplement

Pea Island Station, built in 1878 was individual of 18 stations on the external Banks run by the U Lifesaving Service, then a division of the Treasury Department and subsequently part of the U Coast Guard. In 1879 after the survivors of the sinking Henderson reached shore and base the first Pea Island ship's company sound asleep, Richard Etheridge--"a colored man strong, intelligent and able to read and write [and] individual of the best surfmen upon this part of the coast" in the words of the investigator sent on the outside to report on the Henderson incident--was appointed as Pea Island keeper He recruited six black surfmen and from then until the station's closing in 1947 the keeper (with single brief exception) and his ship's company were black.

For 20 years, Etheridge ran what was widely recognized as single of the service's best stations. Like other like stations, Pea island's isolated existence was individual of boredom and the routine of constant training interrupted by means of episodes of incredible daring amid gale-driven waves, moonles night ransoms and treacherous surf. if a ship was in desperate danger, the weather was almost certainly horrendous; more certainly still, the Pea Island extricate boat would row through waves that towered above them in an attempt to shut up on a ship of several tons, which would hurl them straight to the bottom should the sea fling single against the other.

This was Richard Etheridge's world. single the boredom of repeated training coupl with the danger recalled Etheridge's early incarnation as a noncommissioned combat officer during the Civil War.

In the 1930 shoaling left Pea Island no longer an island, granting the dune peas that provided its name still flourished and attracted thousands of birds. Now devoid of inhabitants, Pea Island is a wildlife shield But on nearly Roanoke Island, the North Carolina Aquarium has an exhibit upon the Pea Island station, while just outside the aquarium entrance the graves of Richard Etheridge and his family remain in their original location as a memorial. shut up by lies a commemorative stone marker honoring the men of Pea Island station.

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