Wreck of the Metropolis: Eighty-Five Lives and a Service Reformed
North Carolina
About three-fifths of a mile southeast of here, on January thirty-first, eighteen seventy-eight, the steamer Metropolis ran aground on a sandbar one hundred yards from the Currituck shore. The ship was carrying two hundred forty-five workers bound for Brazil to build a railroad. By the time rescue crews arrived, hauling heavy equipment across an overwashed beach through a winter storm, eighty-five people had drowned.
The disaster exposed a United States Lifesaving Service that was chronically underfunded, poorly trained, and staffed by political appointees. Congress responded by authorizing new stations and demanding that eleven be operating in North Carolina within a year. The tragedy directly shaped the professional, life-saving organization that would later become the United States Coast Guard.
