One of America’s great military branches is the United States Coast Guard. Since its inception, its core value has been saving lives. Something they’ve done millions of times over. And incredibly, their beginnings can be traced to one tragic shipwreck located right here on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

The USS Huron was a federal gunboat built in Chester, PA, in 1875, with steam engines and fully-rigged. She was the last of two ships to be built of iron rather than steel.

It was 1:30 in the morning on a bitterly cold and blustery November 24, 1877, when the Huron ran hard aground. In fact, the grounding was so violent that the Huron was badly stuck. Incredibly, she was only 200 yards offshore of the Nags Head beach (near the present-day location of the Bladen Street beach access near Milepost 11). Once grounded she immediately took on water and began breaking apart. But surely they were close enough to swim to shore, weren’t they? Indeed they were, but at this point in history, very few knew how to swim, even sailors who toiled upon the waters. Also, keep in mind, this was the middle of the night, in the middle of a near hurricane, in the bitter, freezing cold of November. Conditions were worsening by the minute. Literally every huge new wave carried someone else off the Huron to disappear into the raging surf.

When it was all over, of the Huron’s crew of 132, only 34 survived. The total death toll reached 98, with bodies washing ashore for the next two weeks, some as far as 30 miles away.

Now, you may wonder where the surf-men of the nearby United States Life-Saving Service Station at Nags Head may have been during all this. Well, sadly, they were at home, waiting for the station to open the following month for their active season. They were not yet on duty.

To understand how we got here, we have to go back to the beginning. In fact, a movie scriptwriter would be hard-pressed to create a fictitious story with more disastrous circumstances, bad luck, and a chain reaction of calamity than the true story of the Navy ship USS Huron.

The Huron departed New York in late November 1877, the worst possible time, on a secret military expedition to survey parts of the coast of Cuba. On the way she put in at Norfolk, Virginia for coal and supplies and was set to depart immediately. Instead, orders came down to wait for a government draftsman to come onboard. This delay turned out to be another factor in her fate.

On her fourth day, Friday, November 23, she defiantly departed Norfolk. “The storm signals were flying three days and it is thought strange that this warning should have been disregarded. There was a fierce storm raging all night along the coast, the wind having blown about seventy miles an hour,” the Daily Kennebec Journal, Maine published on November 26, 1877.

As it is so often in tragedies, the process involves a string of many poor decisions. The initial timing of the voyage was the first. The second was the delay in Norfolk. The third was on the Huron’s captain, George Ryan. Heading south, fighting the Gulf Stream current which moves steadily and powerfully in the opposite direction from which the Huron was heading. To compensate, Ryan had the same two choices any ship captain has had for centuries. Either go far out to sea to the east to avoid the current or hug the coast and stay inside of it. The first was safer but took longer. The second was much quicker but was much more dangerous. Commander Ryan had faith in his new, iron-hulled ship which was surely stronger than this gale, he thought. He chose the second option, to hug the coast. The inevitable followed.

A small navigational miscalculation after the Huron passed the Currituck Lighthouse, but before reaching the Bodie Island Lighthouse, indicated the Huron to be further offshore than she actually was. It was at this point at 1:30 in the morning the Huron ran hard aground.

Up to this point, the United States Life-Saving Service had been a subordinate branch of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, headed by Sumner I. Kimball. The service had shamefully been dominated by cronyism and rampant in politics of the day. The public outrage from the Huron sinking was heightened with another Outer Banks shipwreck only 20 miles away when the steamer Metropolis went ashore at Currituck Beach. In that wreck, another 85 souls were lost. And in that same location in March just the year before, the Italian bark Nuova Ottavia had mysteriously grounded. Unfortunately for all involved, the rescue was bobbled by the station there, who had arrived late to the wreck, and even worse, totally unprepared. The entire crew of lifesavers and five Italian sailors drowned. So for America, the sinking of the Huron appeared to be the final straw.

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Newspapers at the time were demanding change and improvement in the life-saving service. There appeared to be only one choice to lead the service into a new era, and that person was Sumner Kimball. Well aware of the services’ poor reputation, Kimball moved swiftly and constructed a highly organized service. Hundreds of stringent rules, regulations, and procedures were implemented. Politics were out, and competence, experience, and skills were in. And because of this, since then, the men of the United States Life-Saving Service, sometimes under dreadful conditions, responded to over 178,000 lives in peril from the sea, of which they saved OVER 177,000. This is the legacy of the first and only superintendent of the United States Life-Saving Service, Sumner Kimball. Sumner ultimately retired in 1915 when his service morphed into the United States Coast Guard, where his legacy lives on every day.

So it was this wreck of the USS Huron off the Nags Head beach that gave the US Coast Guard its beginnings. The next time you are near the Bladen Street Access, read the commemorative plaque on the Beach Road and visit the gazebo where more information is provided at the foot of the ramp leading to the very waters that became the final resting place of the USS Huron.

For more information on this and other shipwrecks on our shores, read James Charlet’s Shipwrecks of the Outer Banks: Dramatic Rescues and Fantastic Wrecks in the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Available at bookstores
on the Outer Banks.