Lewis Wescott was a Black man who was born in North Carolina just before the Civil War and died just before World War II.
Little has been known about his life except that he was a surfman, a Coast Guard captain and a hero who participated in one of the most daring ocean rescues in Outer Banks history.
But thanks to the serendipitous discovery of his gravesite by a retired Coast Guard commander, we now know that Wescott, a member of the famed all-Black crew at Pea Island Life-Saving Station, lived two weeks short of 83 years, and he is buried next to his wife in Jarvisburg, a community on the Currituck County mainland.