The Graveyard of the Atlantic

Between 1874 and 1915, the journals of the four United States Lifesaving Service stations covering the 38-mile Virginia Beach coastline recorded 185 shipwrecks, giving the area the name "The Graveyard of the Atlantic." In 1915, the U.S. Lifesaving Service joined the Revenue Cutter Service to form the U.S. Coast Guard. Among the wrecks was the Henry B. Hyde, a three-masted sailing ship driven ashore by high winds and heavy seas in February 1904; surfmen from Dam Neck Mills rescued all 13 people aboard, but attempts to refloat the vessel failed until a storm in September briefly freed it, only for it to ground again on a new sandbar and be abandoned as unsalvageable. The four-masted Benjamin F. Poole was beached during a coastal storm in April 1889 while trying to reach the shelter of the Chesapeake Bay, and surfmen rescued the entire crew by breeches buoy; after remaining stranded for 15 months, it became the setting for Captain Hjalmar Charlton's 1890 honeymoon until a three-day storm in September refloated the ship, which later returned to service. The first four lifesaving stations along the Virginia Beach coast were built from the same plans between 1874 and 1878, with rooms for boats, mess, storage, the keeper, crew barracks, and rescued victims, plus a roof observatory for day watch, and later larger second-generation stations replaced them while the original buildings were often retained for other uses. Crewmen such as John Woodhouse Sparrow of the Seatack Lifesaving Station patrolled the oceanfront in all weather and trained rigorously; Sparrow received the USLSS Silver Medal for rescuing four men from the wrecked Jennie Hall on Dec. 12, 1900. The most tragic wreck along the Virginia Beach oceanfront came in the spring of 1891, when the Norwegian bark Dictator, damaged in a storm off Bermuda and heading for Virginia repairs, foundered on a sandbar north of Seatack Station. Crews from Seatack and Cape Henry worked for 12 hours and brought eight people ashore, but as the vessel broke apart in darkness and heavy surf, Captain J.M. Jorgensen, his wife, their 3-year-old son, and four crewmen made a final attempt to reach land; the son was swept away, Mrs. Jorgensen and the four crewmen drowned, and Captain Jorgensen was later found unconscious but alive. The ship's carved wooden figurehead washed ashore and became known as the Norwegian Lady, remaining on the Boardwalk at 16th Street until 1953, while Jorgensen returned each year for more than 30 years on the anniversary of the wreck to cast flowers into the ocean in memory of his family and crew.

Virginia Beach, Virginia · United States