William T. West
keeper, Ocean City Life-Saving Station · active 1878–1889
First keeper of the Ocean City Life-Saving Station — Station No. 4 of the Fifth District, 'just north of town' — which commenced operations on December 25, 1878 with a crew of six surfmen, and its keeper until 1889. Addressed as Captain, he was the station's only year-round employee; the keeper's salary in his first season was $400 a year. He wrote the station's daily log by hand — weather, drills, beach patrols, tide readings, shipwrecks and rescues — and the volume covering December 25, 1878 to January 22, 1880 survives, with the original a permanent exhibit at the Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum and the keeper's reports held at the Nabb Research Center. His first winter worked three wrecks on the Worcester coast — the Moses Day in February 1879, the E. A. Barnard in March, and the 799-ton bark Champion later the same month, taken by Lyle gun and life-car. In July 1879 his crew drilled on the beach for a Fourth of July crowd. On the night of March 23, 1882 his crew took six men off the schooner Martha Collins in the dark — the earliest documented rescue by the Ocean City station, ten months before the better-known Sallie W. Kay. On January 10, 1883, with the beach under twenty inches of snow and no horses to be had, he sent for a pair of oxen to haul the thousand-pound mortar-cart five miles north to the wreck of the coal schooner Sallie W. Kay, and landed six of her seven crew by breeches buoy — a rescue in which one of his own crew was lost.
In the record (5)
1878
What the government paid to have men on this beach: $400 a year for a station keeper, and a district superintendent's whole salary was $1,000.
The Life-Saving Service appropriation for the fiscal year covering the winter of 1878–79 reads: "For salary of keepers of life-saving and life-boat stations, at $400 each … For salary of one superintendent for the life-saving stations on the coasts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, District No. 5, $1,000.00." Crew pay was a lump sum — "For pay of crews of experienced surfmen at such stations and for such periods as the Secretary of the Treasury may deem necessary and proper, $246,260" — spent across a service that grew from 149 keepers in the quarter ending September 30, 1878 to 171 in the quarter ending June 30, 1879. Volunteer life-boat crews were paid "not to exceed $10 for each person" per occasion of disaster. The Fifth District superintendent was Benjamin S. Rich of Onancock, Virginia; the district's inspecting officer was Capt. William J. Herring of the Revenue Marine at Chincoteague.
Four hundred dollars a year to run the station and walk the winter beach — about the price of a hundred and sixty nights at the Atlantic Hotel.
United States Life-Saving Service
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1878 · 1878-12-25
On Christmas Day 1878 the U.S. Life-Saving Service opens Station No. 4, Fifth District — Ocean City — with Keeper William T. West and six surfmen.
The federal register of stations for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1879 lists the Fifth District, "embracing coast between Cape Henlopen and Cape Charles," as eleven stations: 1 Cape Henlopen, 2 Rehoboth Beach, 3 Indian River Inlet, 4 Ocean City, 5 Green Run Inlet, 6 Pope's Island, 7 Assateague Beach, then Cedar Inlet, Hog Island, Cobb's Island and Smith's Island in Virginia. Ocean City's locality is given as "Just north of town." The report's table of surfmen employment for the season of 1878–79 carries a Fifth District row of one station, six surfmen, "December 25, 1878, to April 30, 1879, inclusive" — the station's first active season, opening the day the crew moved in and closing at the end of April. The Ocean City Museum Society, which holds the station's original daily log book ("12/25/1878–1/22/1880," handwritten), records that "the new station commenced operations on December 25 under the command of Capt. William T. West," its first keeper, who held the post until 1889. Green Run Beach, twenty miles down the barrier island and manned since 1875, had been the only life-saving station on the Maryland coast until this day.
The town got its train in 1876, its telegraph in 1877 and its lifesavers on Christmas Day 1878 — a paid federal crew walking the beach all night through a winter when the hotels were shuttered and there was nobody here to save but sailors.
Ocean City Life-Saving Station MuseumUnited States Life-Saving Service
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1879
Ocean City's Life-Saving Station is Station No. 4 of the Fifth District — "just north of town," opened December 1878 and worked through its first full year in 1879.
The Life-Saving Service's annual report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1879 lists the Ocean City station as No. 4 in the Fifth District, which embraced the coast between Cape Henlopen and Cape Charles. Its recorded locality is "Just north of town," at approximately 38°36'40" north, 75°04'30" west. It was one of three Fifth District stations authorized by the Act of June 18, 1878, and the report notes that all three "were opened in that month" — December 1878 — so 1879 was the station's first complete year of operation. The district's assistant inspector was Lieut. William J. Herring of the Revenue Marine, at Chincoteague, Virginia; the district superintendent was Benjamin S. Rich of Onancock, Virginia. The keeper's own daily logs for December 1878 to January 1880, held at the Nabb Research Center, are signed by Keeper William T. West. The same report records that the Chief Signal Officer had "recently established a telegraph-line along the coast from Cape Henlopen to [Cape] Charles, in the Fifth District," and contemplated extending telephones to the stations on that coast.
Ocean City Life-Saving Station MuseumUnited States Life-Saving Service
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1880 · 1880-01-31
At the two-year-old Ocean City Life-Saving Station, surfmen earned $1.33 a day, bought their own uniforms, and were sent home unpaid every summer.
The Ocean City Life-Saving Station was established December 25, 1878, and William T. West served as its first keeper from 1878 to 1889 — the only man on the payroll year-round. His surviving Keeper's Reports, held at the Nabb Research Center at Salisbury University, run from 1878 through January 1880 and record "day to day account of duties performed by the station, tide reports and weather conditions." The service's own terms of employment: surfmen were paid $1.33 a day, had to buy their own uniforms, had to be between 18 and 45, weigh between 135 and 205 pounds, pass a fitness examination — and were dismissed without pay through the summer, when the wrecking season was over and, not incidentally, the beach was full of bathers. No wreck or rescue at the Ocean City station during calendar 1880 was found in this pass.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1883 · 1883-01-10
Six men come off the Sallie W. Kay in a breeches buoy after nine hours on the bowsprit; the seventh, a German sailor called "Antonie," drowns trying to swim for help.
The three-masted, two-decked schooner Sallie W. Kay of Somers Point, New Jersey, Captain E. H. Smith, ran from Baltimore for Boston with a cargo of coal and stranded about 250 yards off the beach roughly five miles north of Ocean City — near what is now 90th Street — at 6 a.m. on January 10, 1883, in a blinding snowstorm. The sea broke over her and the seven-man crew took to the bowsprit. About 9 o'clock one of them, a German whose surname never made the record and whom the crew called "Antonie," jumped and tried to swim ashore against wind and tide; he was numbed and lost. A fisherman's son sighted the wreck in a lull, and the station lookout picked her up around 11. With the beach under twenty inches of snow and no horses to be had, Keeper William T. West sent for a pair of oxen: "The men buckled to with the oxen, tugging the landed mortar-cart, with its thousand pounds' weight of apparatus, over the snow-clogged, torn, and flooded beach." The apparatus reached the scene about 2 p.m.; "at first shot the line flew over the foretopmast stay," and in half an hour the six survivors were landed. They reached the station at 6 p.m. Antonie's body washed up two days later on North Beach, a quarter mile north of James Birch's.
Twelve hours, twenty inches of snow, a borrowed team of oxen, and one shot with a Lyle gun. This is the single best-documented thing that happened at Ocean City in 1883, and nobody at the hotels was there to see it.
Source · checked 2026-08-06