Vermilion Point - Life Saving Service

Life Saving Service

The Vermilion Lifesaving Station began operation in 1877 on the Lake Superior coast known as the “Graveyard of the Great Lakes”or, the "Shipwreck Coast". Shipwrecks along this coast dramatically increased after the Soo Locks opened this coastline to shipping in 1855. During this time, the United States Life-Saving Service established three other sister life saving stations between Munising and Whitefish Point, Michigan at Crisp Point Light, Deer Park, and Two Hearted River. Vermilion is the only site of the four life saving stations that still has remaining historical structures.

Servicemen considered duty at the Vermilion Live Saving Station so hard and desolate that some called it the “Alcatraz” of the U.S. Life-Saving Service. Life for the men and their families was isolated and monotonous except during dangerous, dramatic rescue operations in boiling seas. For many years there were few roads and supplies were delivered by boat. During the snowbound winter months in the 1930s, they received their mail by dog sled.

The Vermilion surfmen’s rigorous training and drills with self-bailing and self-righting lifeboats in rolling seas made them so skillful that the United States Life Saving Service chose them to demonstrate their life saving at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904.

The United States Life-Saving Service was merged with U.S. Coast Guard in 1915. The advent of bigger and better diesel freighters, better weather forecasting, and improved radio communication and navigational instruments such as radar greatly increased the safety of sailing. Following World War II, the Coast Guard found that the life saving stations were no longing serving a useful purpose. The Vermilion Life Saving Station was first merged with the Crisp Point Lifesaving Station as an unmanned sub-station in 1940, and then closed in 1944.