The station's founding was rooted in an earlier rescue. On December 30, 1828 - 38 years before any lifeboat existed at Ballywalter - the steamship Sheffield ran aground on Skullmartin Rock just offshore. Through more than six hours of effort, the master, 20 crew members and 24 passengers were all rescued by a coastguard boat. The Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, founded in 1824 and renamed the RNLI in 1854, awarded medals for sea rescues whether or not lifeboats were involved. Three silver medals went out for the Sheffield rescue, including one to James Askin, a volunteer who simply stepped forward to fill an empty seat in the coastguard boat. He was a fisherman whose name is otherwise lost to history, except for that single act and the medal that followed it.

Almost four decades later, on September 27, 1866, the Ballywalter Lifeboat Station officially opened. Reverend Hugh Wilson took the post of Honorary Secretary. Robert Boyd became coxswain. Robert Adair was named second coxswain. A boathouse at the pier head was built by local contractor Samuel Grivin for 178 pounds and 10 shillings. The 32-foot, ten-oared lifeboat with twin masts arrived in Belfast in July of that year, the London and Belfast Steam Shipping Company having transported it free of charge as a gift to the cause. The boat, the carriage and the boathouse were all paid for by a single 500-pound donation from the Misses Maynell-Ingram of Rugeley in Staffordshire, who asked that the lifeboat be named Admiral Henry Meynell, in memory of their late uncle. Two years later, the Admiral Henry Meynell would capsize beneath Boyd.

On the afternoon of February 6, 1883, the brig Euphemia Fullerton, sailing from Derry toward Maryport, was driven by an east-south-east gale onto Long Rock off Ballywalter. The lifeboat was hauled overland by a crowd of villagers, who manhandled it across two ditches to reach a launching point. Once afloat, the storm immediately drove it back ashore, breaking three oars. They launched again at three in the morning. Six crew of the Euphemia Fullerton had spent the night lashed to the rigging in freezing spray, and the lifeboat finally got them off. Reverend J. O'Reilly Blackwood was awarded the RNLI Silver Medal for taking charge. So was George Prior, Chief Officer of HM Coastguard at Ballywalter, who had waded out into the surf at great personal risk to help launch and recover the boat. Lifeboat launcher J. B. Glover received what was then the highest non-medal award: Thanks of the Institution inscribed on vellum.

A larger 34-foot lifeboat, William Wallace (ON 93), arrived at Ballywalter on January 31, 1885 - again brought free of charge, this time from Liverpool to Belfast, by the Belfast and Londonderry Steam Packet Company. The boat was funded by the legacy of William Wallace of Curtain Road, Shoreditch in London. Then came an awkward fact. Over the next two decades the station's calls dwindled. Across the last nine years on station, the William Wallace was launched on a real service call only once. Steamships were replacing sailing ships in the Irish Sea trade, and shipwreck patterns shifted away from the rocks off Ballywalter. The RNLI closed the station in 1906, withdrew the William Wallace from service and broke her up. The original 1866 boathouse is still standing today. The villagers who hauled the lifeboat across two ditches to reach the Euphemia Fullerton are gone. The pier is still there. The sea still runs past Long Rock.