Along North Carolina’s "Graveyard of the Atlantic," where many vessels were lost to storms, wars, and pirates, Richard Etheridge and his crew carried out a famous rescue during the devastating 1896 hurricane season. On the night of October 11, 1896, the 393 ton schooner E.S. Newman, carrying six crewmen, Captain Garner, his wife, and their three-year-old son Tommy, ran aground south of the station during a hurricane so intense that the ocean and sound became one body of water. Although beach patrol had been suspended as too dangerous, Theodore Meekins spotted a faint red flare from the station tower, and Etheridge assembled the crew. In waist-deep water they hauled the beach cart to the wreck, but Etheridge quickly saw that none of its equipment could be used. He then asked for volunteers to swim through the raging surf to the schooner, and Theodore Meekins and Stanley Wise stepped forward, tied together with a line secured by surfmen on shore. Reaching the wreck through debris and heavy surf, they got a line aboard with a heaving stick, and Tommy was brought off first, held tightly by a surfman as those on shore pulled them through the water. The remaining eight people were rescued the same way, with two surfmen making each dangerous trip to the wreck. According to legend, Theodore Meekins made all nine trips that night. A century later, on March 5, 1996, Richard Etheridge, Benjamin Bowser, Dorman Pugh, Theodore Meekins, Lewis Wescott, Stanley Wise, and William Irving were posthumously awarded the U.S. Coast Guard Gold Life-Saving Medal.