The Coast Guard: America's Oldest Maritime Defenders
Near Toledo, Ohio
Most people know the Navy and the Army, but the United States Coast Guard is the oldest continuously operating naval service in the country, since the Continental Navy was disbanded after the Revolution.
The service traces its roots to seventeen ninety, when Congress authorized a fleet of ten small cutters to enforce tariff and trade laws along the coast. For its first hundred and twenty-five years it was known first as the Revenue Marine and later the Revenue Cutter Service. In nineteen fifteen it merged with the Life-Saving Service, which had spent decades pulling sailors off wrecked ships along the Great Lakes and both coasts, and took the name Coast Guard.
On the Great Lakes, the Coast Guard's mission has always been especially vital. Lake Erie alone sees tens of millions of tons of cargo move every year through its ports. The cutters and rescue crews operating out of stations like this one have been keeping that commerce and those sailors alive since before the republic was a generation old.
