In 1790 the new United States needed money and had almost none. Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, persuaded Congress to authorize ten armed cutters to collect import duties from foreign ships. Within six years those ten boats had brought in 92 percent of federal revenue and the country had paid off its foreign debt. The Revenue Cutter Service was the seed that, more than a century later, would grow into the U.S. Coast Guard. The other parent was the United States Life-Saving Service, founded in fits and starts after a powerful 1870 storm produced enough corpses on the Atlantic coast that newspaper editors demanded reform. Isolated stations along beaches like Seatack tracked their surfmen with patrol clocks, registering the moment each foot patrol reached its turnaround point so the logs at the station could show that men were actually on the sand at 3 a.m., not asleep by the stove.

The Norwegian barque Dictator was hauling lumber when she came up the coast in a March gale in 1891. The ship struck broadside near Seatack and began to break up. Robinson, surfman at Station #2, remembered his keeper, Captain Drinkwater, telling the crew that the ship was coming ashore. The men dragged their apparatus cart not down the beach but down a country road blocked by fallen trees, because the surf had eaten the beach itself. They set up the Lyle gun, which fires a projectile trailing a rope, and shot for the ship three times. Each shot fell short in the wind. The crew of the Dictator dropped a cask with their own line. The surfmen made the connection. The breeches buoy, a life ring with cloth britches sewn through it, rode out on a hawser line. Three men came back alive. Then wreckage fouled the line. The captain put his wife and son on a ladder lashed with life-preservers and tried to ride the waves in. One wave took his wife. Another took his son. He reached the beach alone. Nine survived. The ship's figurehead washed up days later and became the original Norwegian Lady, a memorial to the lost.

There were dozens of other shipwrecks off this coast. The Virginia Beach coastline is part of the Graveyard of the Atlantic, the stretch of barrier sand from Virginia to Cape Hatteras that has been swallowing ships since the seventeenth century. Surfman John Woodhouse Sparrow earned the USLSS Silver Lifesaving Medal for the 1900 rescue of four crewmen from the wreck of the Jennie Hall, ten miles south of Cape Henry. The Jennie Hall was a total loss. Four lived. The museum's collection of photographs, ship parts, patrol clocks, and beach apparatus tells these stories one wreck at a time, and the larger story of the men whose job was to walk a beach in the dark in a winter storm and be ready for the worst.

In 1915 Congress merged the U.S. Life-Saving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service into the United States Coast Guard. Seatack Station #2 became Coast Guard Station #162. The Coast Guard decommissioned it in 1969, after which the building sat empty for ten years awaiting demolition. In 1979 local preservationists organized to save it, and the Virginia Beach Maritime Museum opened that year. It became the Life-Saving Museum of Virginia in 1988, the Old Coast Guard Station Museum in 1996, and today operates as the Virginia Beach Surf & Rescue Museum. The original 1903 building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The Norwegian Lady, a 1962 replica of the Dictator's figurehead sent by the town of Moss, Norway, stands on the boardwalk a hundred yards north.

On a busy summer day the boardwalk in front of the museum is rented bicycles, sunburned families, kettle corn, and the distant lifeguard whistles of the modern surf-rescue beach patrol. It is easy to walk past the small clapboard building with its peaked roof and lookout tower and miss what it is. Inside, the museum is small enough to walk through in under an hour, and old enough to feel like a confession. Wreckage. Photographs. A breeches buoy. A 1900 medal earned by John Woodhouse Sparrow. A figurehead facing east across the Atlantic toward the town in Norway that sent her, in memory of a captain and his family who never made it to shore.