Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum

The take

Before the Coast Guard there were the surfmen — crews who rowed into storms to pull shipwrecked sailors out of the Atlantic, and this 1891 station housed them. The building was moved to the Inlet in 1977 and has been the town's history museum since 1978. If you make one history stop in Ocean City, make it this one.

Heritage context

• Ocean City Beach Patrol

  Founded 1930 · active today

  The town's lifeguard service, formed in 1930 under Mayor William W. McCabe with Coast Guard Capt. William Purnell — heir to the surf-rescue tradition the U.S. Life-Saving Service ran from the 1878 station. Still guards the beach every summer. ⚠ THE 1930 FOUNDING IS NOT ATTESTED IN ANY CONTEMPORARY SOURCE. All 704 pages of the 1930 Chronicling America corpus for Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and the District were read: "beach patrol" occurs once and means Rehoboth's; "life guard" occurs once and means Herald Harbor's; "lifeguard" and "life saver" occur nowhere; and NO DROWNING AT OCEAN CITY, MD. IS REPORTED ALL YEAR. From modern secondary retellings only, and to be read as such: the first guard is named as Edward Lee Carey, hired because bathers had drifted north beyond North Division Street and out of sight of the Coast Guard lookout on Caroline Street; John Laws followed as a weekend guard; Robert "Bob" Craig of Wilmington joined by about 1935. Note also that Elisha Victor Bunting was already being called "a member of the Ocean City guard" in 1927 — so if anything was founded in 1930 it was a formalisation of something already working. FIRST CONTEMPORARY TRACE, 1932 — and it is a trace, not a founding. The Evening Star of 29 October 1932, reporting a Carnegie Hero Fund award for a rescue at Ocean City on 19 August 1931, says that after the rescuer brought the drowning man ashore "physicians and LIFE GUARDS worked over Mallory 30 minutes before bringing him back to consciousness," and that "warnings not to swim had been posted due to the heavy surf." Guards on the beach, and a flag system. It names no patrol and confirms no 1930 founding, but it is the earliest contemporary evidence of organised lifeguarding at Ocean City the campaign has. ADD: 1931 read in full — 699 pages, MD/DE/VA/DC — with no mention of a beach patrol, a life guard or a lifeguard at Ocean City, Maryland. The only 1931 surf rescue in the record was made by a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout from Washington. The 'Ocean City Beach Patrol' that does appear in the 1931 Washington press, on 20 August, is NEW JERSEY'S.

• United States Life-Saving Service

  1878–1915

  The federal agency that manned the American beaches. Its predecessor was a scatter of unpaid volunteer stations under the Revenue Marine Bureau; Sumner I. Kimball's reforms from 1871 professionalized it, and the Act of June 18, 1878 made it a bureau of the Treasury in its own right with Kimball as General Superintendent. That act authorised 37 additional stations, three of them in the Fifth District — the coast between Cape Henlopen and Cape Charles — and one of those three was Ocean City, Station No. 4, opened in December 1878 'just north of town.' The district's first season tallied 11 wrecks, 77 people aboard, 77 saved and none lost. Its annual reports (FY1876–1914) are the standing federal record of this coast.