By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on September 30, 2025

Left photograph:Joan Collins stands next to a picture of her father, Herbert Collins, depicting his service at Pea Island Station.
Right photograph: The Pea Island Cookhouse Museum in Manteo.
Source: Outer Banks Voice - Photographs credit: Kip Tabb

Joan Collins is finishing a tour of the Pea Island Cookhouse Museum in Manteo, telling the family gathered around her about the history of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station. It is a remarkable one.

For 67 years, from 1880 until it was decommissioned in 1947, the station was manned by an all African American crew. Her father, Herbert Collins, “served at Pea Island from 1940 to 1947 and he would have been the last left in charge” when it was decommissioned, Collins told the Voice.

The history of the station includes the rescue of the crew of the schooner ES Newman during a raging hurricane on Oct. 11, 1896. Finally, on March 5, 1996, the Pea Island Lifesaving crew was awarded the Coast Guard’s Gold Lifesaving Medal—the Coast Guard’s highest medal for valor.

But the institutional racism of the 19th Century is a part of the story that can’t be ignored. “I always say, this is a wonderful story. And it is. They did get a Gold Lifesaving Medal, but it took 100 years to get it,” Collins said.

Collins is the Director of Outreach and Education for the Pea Island Preservation Society, Inc. (PIPSI), the nonprofit organization that owns and manages the museum. The museum is small, filled with memorabilia and artifacts recalling the history of the station. The building itself was moved to its current location in 2006, and at one time, it was the cookhouse for the Pea Island Station.

PIPSI is an all-volunteer organization, and Collins wears a number of hats, but mostly she is the outreach and marketing person. Much of her work includes a meticulous examination of the history of the Pea Island Station and the African American Coast Guardsmen—and before that, the men of the Lifesaving Service that became the Coast Guard in 1915.

For Collins, telling the story of the station and preserving its history has become a personal quest, although it has not always been that way. Her father “had talked about his experiences, but…I’m not really paying attention, because I’m kind of [building] my career,” Collins said.

Having lived in Washington DC as a child when her father’s Coast Guard career took him to the nation’s capital, Collins spent 32 years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her time there included, as she noted, “dealing with the enforcement aspect of the agency.”

The work helped train her “to dig in and prove things and look at documents,” she added. “And [history is] not necessarily accepting what people say or write, because a lot of what’s written is not necessarily what the fact pattern shows.”

Herbert Collins retired from the Coast Guard in 1976 as a lieutenant after a 37- year career. And while he was an officer at the end of his career, he began his time with the service in as low a position as there was.

He was born on Roanoke Island. In 1938 when he was 17, there was no possibility that he could graduate from high school since “if you’re Black, to go to the twelfth grade, you have to go to Elizabeth City,” Joan Colllins said. “So his father encouraged him to go to the Coast Guard.”

At that time, “the only way he could enter [the Coast Guard] was as a mess attendant. So he begins his career shining shoes and serving meals and essentially being a houseboy to white officers on a ship.”

It was after the Gold Lifesaving Medal award that Collins began to realize how important the history of the station was. She describes being grateful that she was able to speak with her father about his experiences in the Coast Guard and what the Pea Island Station represented.

“I was able to listen to him tell stories, and that began the process for me,” she recalled.

Collins brings a historian’s eye to telling the story of the station. Although the ES Newman is the most well-known action that occurred during the time it was in operation, she believes there is far more to the station’s story.

“This station existed for 67 years, [closing in] 1947, and when you think about the political climate, when you’re a historian, the political climate that’s going on you can imagine…what’s really happening,” she said, referring to the segregated military at the time.

If the political climate limited what Herbert Collins could do in the Coast Guard early in his career, and made higher education an unachievable goal, his daughter came to see that his seven years at the Pea Island Station was its own opportunity.

“He used to talk about all the friends that he met while he served here. It was a genuine love for the Pea Island Station, and the history, and I’ve come to understand it because it opened the door for so many that would have not had that experience,” she said.

The Pea Island Cookhouse Museum is open by appointment only. For more information go to Pea Island Preservation Society webpage.