Virginia Beach Surf and Rescue Museum: The Men Who Went Out

At the oceanfront end of Atlantic Avenue, a distinctive shingled building with a lookout tower stands apart from the resort hotels and T-shirt shops that crowd the Virginia Beach boardwalk. This is the old Seatack Lifesaving Station, built in nineteen oh three, and it is one of the few surviving examples of the network of stations that watched over one of the most shipwreck-prone coastlines in North America.

The Life-Saving Service, the predecessor to the United States Coast Guard, established its first station at this location in eighteen seventy-eight. The Virginia capes and the Outer Banks immediately to the south were notorious among mariners. The shoals and sandbanks that extend far offshore, combined with the convergence of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream, created conditions that had been sinking ships since the earliest European voyages. Hundreds of vessels went down within sight of the Virginia Beach shore.

The surfmen, as the station crews were called, worked in rotating seasonal shifts, usually four to eight months a year, and spent the rest of their time fishing and farming. When a ship went onto the shoals, they launched surfboats into the breaking surf and rowed out to the wreck. The work was genuinely dangerous. The service's motto was you have to go out, but you don't have to come back.

The nineteen oh three building replaced an earlier station on the same site. It was one of the last major stations built before the Life-Saving Service merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to form the United States Coast Guard in nineteen fifteen. The Coast Guard decommissioned the station in nineteen sixty-nine, and the building sat unused for nearly a decade before advocates secured its preservation.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine, the building became a museum, the Virginia Beach Surf and Rescue Museum. Inside, exhibits trace the history of the Life-Saving Service, document the shipwrecks that drove its creation, and honor the surfmen who rowed out when other men had given up.