HATTERAS — Following last week’s private tours and state officials doing the honors at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum reopened to the public Monday with a brand-new exhibit gallery that artfully illustrates the sweep of four centuries of some of the most dramatic maritime history in the world.
“I have a question for you,” said North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Reid Wilson during his remarks Thursday. “The last five letters of the word history — what do those letters spell? Story.”
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And that is the value of museums: telling the human story, he told a large crowd gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Understanding where we were, he added, is the only way we move forward.
“We should not be scared of our history,” he said. “We should learn from it.”
For the island community, the celebration is more than the museum reopening; the celebration is that it is completed. It took 38 years of persistence from stubborn Hatteras Villagers to get there. But that’s another story.
“Goodness gracious, I hardly know where to begin to thank the hundreds of individuals and entities who this important cultural facility would not be possible without them and their sacrifices both personal and in their livelihoods,” said Danny Couch, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, in his remarks Thursday.
Couch, a Hatteras Island native, is one of those who stuck it out for decades, never letting go of the idea that Hatteras had to have a maritime museum.
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“Raleigh (officials) said it should be in Manteo or Nags Head,” he told Coastal Review in a later interview. “Which is the last thing you want to tell a Hatterasman.”
Standing at the entrance in front of a huge digital measuring stick showing current weather conditions and past hurricane details, Wilson applauded the new state-of-the-art exhibits that include features such as touchscreens, holographic historic people and a huge dynamic sculpture of lifesavers rowing a surfboat through a stormy sea.
The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum harbors a motherlode of maritime stories unique to the Outer Banks, from colonial exploration to piracy to heroic lifesaving service rescues to vicious U-boat attacks to premier boatbuilding.
Situated off the treacherous Diamond Shoals, which squeezed vessels transiting the Atlantic shipping lane close to Cape Hatteras, the Outer Banks has the largest number of the 2,000 shipwrecks scattered along the North Carolina coast.
Today, shipwrecks are only part of subject at the museum, but their significant role on the Outer Banks was the spark that ignited the idea for the museum in Hatteras Village and villagers’ minds. Some islanders have compared a shipwreck off the beach in the old days to a Walmart store spilling its contents today.
Couch remembers the seed first germinating, back in 1973 when a team on the Research Vessel Eastward from Duke University’s Marine Laboratory in Beaufort discovered the long-sought Civil War-era ironclad U.S.S. Monitor 16 miles off the Hatteras coast, where it sank in a storm on New Year’s Eve, 1862.
“Literally, when the Eastward was over top, we saw it as a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “We thought it was a great way to bring in people and a great way to tell our history here.”
There was no place to house even a few artifacts, but villagers wanted to find funding to build a museum. The Monitor was designated as a National Marine Sanctuary, the nation’s first, in 1975. It was to be managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1987, The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, was chosen as the principal repository for more than 210 tons of artifacts recovered from the wreck site.
Villagers were disappointed, but they knew they were up against strong competition.
“A lot of it is the isolation out here,” Couch said about being passed over.
But a year before the Virginia museum was selected, local representatives from the National Park Service and Congress encouraged the nonprofit Hatteras Village Civic Association to compete for the artifacts. Thanks largely to Rep. Walter Jones Sr., a Democrat who represented the Outer Banks at the time, Congress in 1988 passed a bill that funded a feasibility and design-development plan. Jones also made sure that any future Hatteras museum would get a share of Monitor artifacts.
The museum was formally incorporated the next year and designated a nonprofit educational organization in 1991. The National Park Service agreed for a nominal fee to lease the museum 7 acres near the Hatteras docks.
Cathy Parsons, one of the original museum board members, during a chat in the gallery after the ribbon-cutting, remembered the then-Cape Hatteras National Seashore superintendent’s excitement.
“Tom Hartman came running up to us and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a plan!’” she recounted about the superintendent, who was especially supportive of the museum idea. “He said, ‘Y’all should pull something together and put a bid in for the artifacts.’ We did that.”
Along with Belinda Willis and Katie Oden, Parsons is one of the original group of villagers who somehow pulled together the support and money to build the museum.
“It was a group effort,” she said. “They did all the work. All I did was the money part.”
Willis said that the museum originally was going to be small — about 6,500 square feet — and would look like an old Coast Guard station. She described interviewing to find a director, a fundraiser and the architect. Money started coming in: $1 million from NOAA, $800,000 from the state.
Before long, the museum building and its concept expanded.
“It just was mushrooming and mushrooming until we realized that we had a tiger by the tail,” Couch said.
From 1995 to December 1999, additional state and federal support rolled in, and construction began Dec. 10, 1999. The nearly 19,000-square-foot museum, with its imposing ship-like exterior, opened in 2002, with its interior partially completed.
Joseph Schwarzer, who retired in March, was hired as the museum’s executive director in 1995, and he later became director of all three state maritime museums.
Along with Schwarzer’s yeoman work at the helm, the three women who still live in Hatteras also gave credit to their late fellow board member Dale Burrus, who mastered dealing with the political aspects and reveled in talking about the island’s maritime history and the importance of the museum in its telling. Then there was dedication of other late advocates, Richard Jones with the Hatteras Monitor and the late Irene Nolan, then-editor of the Island Breeze and later the founder and editor of the Island Free Press, who volunteered for the museum and kept the islanders informed about the project.
Over the years, continued contributions of charitable funds and grants, including from the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, allowed slow progress on the museum, which had been transferred to the state in 2007.
The museum proved to be a popular public attraction, despite its limited exhibits. But to the frustration of the island community — and Schwarzer — funding always seemed to fall short of finishing the gallery and the exhibits.
There were plenty of times they wanted to give up, the women agreed.
“Lots of times,” Willis said. “Then something would happen and we’d get a little push forward.
“We wrote many a letter.”
Meanwhile, as Willis put it, “the community lost faith in us.” Added Oden: “For 20 years, they’d keep hearing how close we’re getting, how close we’re getting. When we finally opened up, none of this was here. They would be shocked.”
In 2021, money was provided for renovations, and in 2022, contractor Riggs Ward Design started work on the exhibit design.
In addition to the Monomoy surf boat in the center of the gallery area, a first-order Fresnel lens that had once been atop the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse dominates the exhibits, which include numerous artifacts ranging from Native Americans here, early English settlements, wars and shipwrecks, including U-boats.
As visitors step into the museum, they’re greeted with a huge video screen with scenes that thrust them into the ocean with lifesavers and fishers and sailors and that carries them over the barrier islands for a bird’s-eye view. All doors open automatically in the middle like those on Star Trek to ensure temperature control. And the Meekins Chandlery Gift Shop now has entrances from the lobby and the museum.
“This is where the state of North Carolina — as a colony — began to develop, to lead us where we are today,” North Carolina Office of Archives and History Deputy Secretary Darin Waters told attendees before the ribbon-cutting. “And I’m so proud of the fact that you are going to see all of that told within this museum.”
North Carolina Maritime Museums System Interim Director Maria Vann, who joined the project in 2023, said the gallery “has been re-imaged as a treasure chest filled with this region’s unique tales of tragedy and triumph.”
Vann said in a later interview that the selection of a new director is underway, but she is not involved.
“The department will make the decision,” she said. “That decision is not mine.”
Now that the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is actually completed, the former board members said they believe that villagers will be more supportive and start pulling out their old shipwreck artifacts from under the bed to donate to the museum.
“Finally — after all these years!” the women exclaimed in unison.
“This is our vision: a world-class museum that can be enjoyed by everyone,” Willis added.
“It’s a national museum. It’s a peoples’ museum.”
