Rowing a rescue boat on the Graveyard of the Atlantic was not work for the easily seasick.

Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum

Hatteras, North Carolina

The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is a local historical attraction unlike any other in America. It isn't concerned with town businesses-of-yesteryear or old high school sports teams. Its focus is on shipwrecks.

Original 1854 Fresnel lens from the Cape Hatteras lighthouse.

The name sounds like a modern marketing gimmick, but "Graveyard of the Atlantic" has been used for centuries to describe the eastern seaboard of North Carolina, specifically the Outer Banks just offshore. Thousands of ships have been lost along this treacherous maritime stretch, done in by shifting shoals, clashing currents, ruthless pirates, equally ruthless German U-boats, and legendarily awful weather.

The museum stands on a narrow finger of land, mere feet from the surf line. "They showed me what they had planned for the building," said Joe Schwarzer, the museum's founding director. "It was lovely. It had a wooden frame and lots of windows. And I said, 'If you're gonna do that, then this building's gonna get blown away by the first big storm.'"

14-ton propeller out by the museum sign is from the USS Dionysus, a Graveyard ship.

After a trip back to the drawing board, the design of the museum was completely reworked and then built into something low and bunker-like, with only a few tiny portholes to admit outdoor light. It resembles an artful shipwreck. The concrete walls are double-reinforced and two feet thick. They can withstand winds up to 250 mph. They're anchored 12 feet into the ground.

A year after the museum opened, Hurricane Isabel slammed into Hatteras. "The road was gone," said Joe. "I had to go to work by boat." But the building and its artifacts were just fine.

The local Civil Air Patrol hunted Nazi subs during World War II.

Joe said that some of the wood used to build the museum's gift shop was timber from Hatteras homes that had originally been salvaged from the Carroll A. Deering, a famous "ghost ship" found offshore with no trace of its 12-man crew. An exhibit in the museum calls this local salvage activity "Shipwreck Subsistence," and according to Joe it was once common among Hatteras residents. "When a ship wrecked," he said, "it was like opening the doors of a Walmart and saying, 'Take what you want.'"

The museum, now under the direction of Maria Vann, reopened in 2024 after a complete update of its exhibits. "You enter from under what looks like a sunken ship," said Maria, "so you feel like you're underwater." A North Carolina surf rescue boat is a museum centerpiece, displayed with a mannequin rowing crew, and mounted at a steep angle as if being tossed in a furious sea. It suggests that those ashore in Hatteras were not mere harvesters of Graveyard booty, but people willing to risk their necks to save others in peril.

Models of, and relics from, sunken ships fill museum display cases.

Storms are always uncovering wrecks along the coast, which poses a problem when it comes to artifact acquisition at the museum. "You can't have someone just show up and say, 'I found this,'" said Maria. "People could be taking things that they shouldn't. We wouldn't want that." The museum nonetheless has a good selection of legit salvage relics, including fancy tableware, actual pieces of wrecked vessels, and a secret code Enigma Machine from a sunken Nazi U-boat. Even the big propeller out by the museum entrance sign came from a Graveyard ship.

Local salvagers made certain that no wreck went to waste.

Joe said that the museum has a collection of coins washed up on Hatteras beaches, dating back to Ptolemaic Egypt and Ancient Rome. They're cited by some as proof of prehistoric visits to America, but Joe said it was more likely that the coins had long ago fallen into the water in distant ports, were scooped up from the sea bed along with ballast stones by more modern ships, and then spewed along the Hatteras shore when those ships sank in the Graveyard.

Exhibits in the remodeled museum cast a wide rhetorical net. "Gosh, it's as comprehensive a space as you can get," said Maria. There's the prismatic original 1854 Fresnel lens from the Cape Hatteras lighthouse; models of some of the more famous victim-ships; and a display recounting the exploits of the local Civil Air Patrol, which hunted enemy subs during World War II. A "ghosts from the past" wall shows life-size videos of actors portraying people who encountered the Graveyard; for some it was a one-way trip. An interactive display tempts visitors to navigate their way through the shoals without sinking (good luck with that).

Despite the sodden origin of much that is in the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, its artifacts now reside in what may be the most waterproof place on this remote, storm-drenched coast. This is an attraction where you may want to check the weather forecast before you visit, and it's a long drive from anywhere else. "When you go out to Hatteras," said Maria, "you feel like you're at the end of the earth."