♪ - The Life Saving Service is actually known as America's Forgotten Heroes.

It was used in the attempt to rescue 178,000 people.

They rescued 177,000 of them.

- This was not a plush assignment.

They drilled and drilled and drilled.

So when the bell rang and it was time to go to sea, they had it.

- There are over 600 documented shipwrecks along the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

That's just the ones that we know about.

So the number of people that were finding themselves in trouble out here was huge.

- These guys were very pragmatic and their reputation was absolutely stellar.

So you had some level of comfort if you were on one of the ships coming by here that if the weather was going to turn off, there was some competency on shore.

And those stories abound to prove that.

- There are too many people, way too many people that don't know what these just ordinary guys were able to pull off.

And I don't think I'll really ever be happy until they all know about what they did here.

- I'm Larry Grubbs.

I am the president of the Historical Association here at Chicamacomico Life Saving Station in Rodanthe, North Carolina.

My mother's a Midgett and the Midgetts have ties to this station.

My fifth grade grandfather was buried down here in waves.

I go back generations here on Hatteras Island with ties to this life saving station as well as other life saving and Coast Guard stations.

Chickamacomico was the first of the 29 stations commissioned on the coast of North Carolina.

Our original life saving station was opened up as the first station on December 4th of 1874.

It's the most complete U.S.

life saving service site in the country.

And it's the only one in the country that has all of its original buildings.

It's also one of the only places in the country that you can see the beach apparatus drill that we do on Thursday afternoons.

- When wind and wave combined to threaten the lives of those who dared to travel upon the seas, the men of United States Life Saving Service and then Coast Guard left the comfort of their unwindy, sturdy stations and entered into the battle with little more than their wooden boats, cork-filled life jackets, oil-skinned foul-weather gear, and the tools you see here today that led to strength, bravery, and most importantly, training lead the way.

- The beach apparatus drill is not actually a reenactment of a rescue.

It's a reenactment of the training that these guys did in order to be able to perform a rescue.

We wear period uniforms to the late 1870s and we go out there with the beach apparatus cart.

We'll fire a small gun called the Lyle gun, which is a line throwing gun.

It goes very quickly.

There's a lot of moving parts to it.

And at the end of the drill, we will rescue a kid that's picked out of the crowd the same way that they used to do it back in the 1800s to pull them in off a shipwreck.

- All ashore!

- Wow!

Let's hear it for Annabelle!

- It's inspiring to know that we're doing something that they did seriously and would do over and over again to get it right because they had to do it during a storm.

You didn't use this breeches buoy as a rescue apparatus on a nice day.

You could just row the boat out.

This was to be done when you couldn't get your boat cart past breakers and your only way to rescue them was either they jumped into water and got swept away or you use this breeches buoy.

- We're about 90 miles due west of what everybody knows as the Bermuda Triangle.

The southbound cold water Labrador currents and the northbound warm water Gulf Stream currents meet off of Cape Hatteras.

So when you combine that with the shoaling, you've got diamond shoals, you've got Wimble shoals, plus the weather that is created by that warm and cold water mixture and just Hatteras being out in the ocean the way it is, it's just a recipe for shipwrecks.

The life-saving service was formed because of public pressure on Congress from the wrecks of the Urana Metropolis.

Those shipwrecks cost almost 300 lives and the country just went mad over the loss of life because the rescues that were attempted were ineffective and it was a disaster.

Congress took Sumner Kimball, who was basically a lifetime bureaucrat, and they said, "We're going to put you in charge of the life-saving service."

Sumner, instead of making political appointees of station keepers and crews, he would go into the communities and say, "Who's the most capable waterman in this community?

Who's the man that when the chips are down, that the local guys will trust him to get them in and get them back out alive?"

And that was when the life-saving service really started to shine.

The most famous rescue that was ever performed here from Chicamacomico was the torpedoed British tanker Merlot on August 16th of 1918.

The tanker Merlot was carrying a load of aviation fuel and was torpedoed about five miles off the coast of Rodanthe.

Captain John Allen Midgett and five surfmen took surf boat number 1046, which is on display here at Chicamacomico.

They had made three attempts and on the fourth attempt finally managed to launch and rode out into that flaming sea and rescued 42 of the British sailors that were aboard the Merlot.

It remains one of the most decorated maritime rescues in American history.

All of them received the gold life-saving medal, but Captain John Allen Midgett was also awarded the Loving Cup by the King of England.

That's kind of a big deal for the King of England to award a sort of middle-of-the-road U.S.

naval officer with such a prestigious honor.

Before this station was, sort of, being brought back to life by the Historical Association, these buildings were sitting here.

We've got some pictures here of the place when it was, sort of, overgrown and the buildings were sort of becoming dilapidated, falling into disrepair.

They didn't really have a whole lot to start with down here.

You know what the ocean weather does to any structure, especially one that's just sitting empty.

Since the late '70s, early '80s when they really got up and running, there's been a lot of progress made around here.

- I'm Chris Thompson.

I do historic preservation work, so I'm taking it back to the original look.

I do a ton of research before I touch a tool, so I kind of have to go to photographic evidence and then other things that I find and try to piece the whole thing together and try to make it work.

It is the first open station of the 1874 type in the state of North Carolina.

It's considered a carpenter gothic structure, and this building has so many elements to it.

There is an enormous hammer truss, and they have panels that are inset that are cut out, and those little images are referred to as mythical dolphins.

And then this structure has projections through the roof line.

The center one that was referred to as Poseidon's Trident.

We went back to the full-width ramp, which most of them didn't have, but that photograph I found from the Nags Head Station, same builder, same year, the ramp was full width of the structure.

They are the original colors.

So there's a gentleman up in Baltimore, Maryland.

He does historic paint analysis.

Paint had seeped in behind these different types of architectural elements when they painted it originally, so I was able to pull samples off of those areas that hadn't seen weather.

So I have to go to sources all over.

I drive four or five hours each way just locating materials, trying to find pieces here and there.

I only have one chance to get it right, because those that follow me will look at what I did and assume, "Oh, this could be the original piece.

We have to replicate this."

So I have to do my best to get it exactly the way it was so that it's correct for the future.

- I always sort of get this sense of awe when I walk up the steps, and the steps are so worn from the men running up and down them all the time.

You can literally feel their footsteps.

People talk about walking in the footsteps of history.

We really get to do it.

And when I put on that keeper's uniform, I'm very careful to make sure that my uniform is not an exact replica, because I'm not a station keeper.

I'm lucky that I get to portray a station keeper, but it's important to draw that line between the guys that really did it and what we're doing now just to keep their history alive.

The first couple of years, we struggled to get volunteers, because as with anything, people are skeptical.

They're like, "Are they really going to be able to pull it off?"

But now, if you were to try to come in and take one of these guys' positions on this team, good luck to you.

I mean, we're all just so proud of being able to do what we do.

And to be able to do it here, with all the history of this place, and this place being so magical, I can't think of anything better.

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