Two examples of U.S. Life-Saving Service history on the North Carolina coast, the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum and the Chicamacomico Historic Site, are to be showcased on North Carolina public television this month.
PBS North Carolina will feature the coastal history segment on NC Weekend, “a television program that celebrates the best things to see and do in the state,” according to an announcement from the historic site.
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The feature is to be available Monday on the NC Weekend YouTube channel and website, as well as be broadcast on PBS North Carolina as part of the season 22 episode titled “Sea and Salt” at 9 p.m. Nov. 14, 5 p.m. Nov. 15, and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19.
The program will include interviews with Pea Island Preservation Society Director of Outreach and Education Joan Collins and Chicamacomico Historic Site Executive Director John Griffin.
Collins was interviewed for the segment at the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum at the Pea Island station. That’s where surfmen cooked and ate their meals.
The original cookhouse building was moved to Manteo several years ago, renovated, and it opened as a museum in 2008. It’s now open only for special events as improvements are planned.
Griffin was interviewed at the Chicamacomico Historic Site in Rodanthe, where the 150th anniversary of the establishment of North Carolina’s first seven lifesaving stations was recently celebrated. It was the first of the seven stations to be fully operational and now serves as a full-time public museum and attraction.
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The Pea Island station may be best remembered for Keeper Richard Etheridge and his crew’s Oct. 11, 1896, rescue of nine who were aboard the shipwrecked schooner E.S. Newman during a hurricane.
In January 1880, Etheridge, who grew up enslaved on Roanoke Island and fought for freedom during the Civil War, became the first Black person in the nation to command a U.S. Live-Saving Service station when he was selected as keeper of the Pea Island station, the only one with an all-Black crew.
The Chicamacomico site is remembered for the rescue of 42 British merchant seaman aboard the Mirloduring World War II after the fully loaded British tanker was torpedoed by a German sub. The rescue was led by Keeper John Allen Midgett Jr., and the surfmen under his command.
The two sites operated as “sister” stations that were often called to perform joint rescues.
