The oceangoing tug Edward Luckenbach wrecked just north of the North Carolina-Virginia Line on Good Friday, the 3rd of April, 1915. The tug was caught in hurricane force winds and a blinding snow that left her disabled and drove her and her crew into the shore.

Capt. William E. Umstead and 14 of the Luckenbach’s crewmen perished that day. Only two men made it to shore alive. One of them was the tug’s second mate, Cicero Goodwin.

Goodwin was from Cedar Island on the central part of the North Carolina coast. Surrounded by broad estuaries and seemingly endless miles of salt marsh, the island is the most remote corner of the eastern part of Carteret County that is known as Down East.

I first learned about the wreck of the Edward Luckenbach from Betsy Olkowski of New Bern, N.C. Betsy’s husband Steve is the grandson of Cicero Goodwin’s brother Dennis.

Steve and Betsy and their three children were my family’s next-door neighbors when I was growing up in Havelock, N.C., just down the road from New Bern. They are a wonderful family, and all these years later it is still a special joy to know them.

Not long ago, Betsy shared family lore about the wreck with me, as well as old newspaper accounts, coast guard records and other historical documents related to the fate of the Luckenbach and its crew.

The most informative documentary account of the shipwreck is contained in the Annual Report of the United States Coast Guard for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1915.

Betsy also put me in touch with Steve’s aunt, Rosa Chance Croom Johnson, who is Cicero Goodwin’s granddaughter. Rosa was an elementary school teacher in Havelock for many years.

Now 82 years old and living in New Bern, Rosa spent many summers with her grandmother Celia and the Goodwin side of her family on Cedar Island. During those island summers, she listened to many stories about the wreck of the Luckenbach.

 I can’t remember enjoying a conversation any more than I did my conversation with Rosa. We talked a good bit about Cedar Island when she was a girl, but mostly we talked about her granddaddy and the wreck of the Edward Luckenbach.

With a great deal of help from Betsy, Rosa, and the historical research that they shared with me, I have done my best to piece together what happened that stormy day in 1915.

“They lived off the water”

The first thing that Rosa told me was that her grandfather Cicero was born on Cedar Island in 1890. He was from a little village called Roe, which sits on Cedar Island Bay, up near the site where the landing for the state ferry to Ocracoke Island is now.

The village looks out toward the Outer Banks. In those days, the village had a dozen or so cottages, a church, a little general store, docks, clusters of net houses and a crowd of fishing boats.

If you walked through the village, you’d see fishermen’s nets drying in front yards. A wooden boat– often being planked or maybe with just a keel laid down– was often being built nearby.

Women and children might be knitting or mending nets, or shucking clams or oysters for dinner.

When Cicero was young, the state had not yet built a bridge or road that connected Cedar Island to the rest of Down East. If the islanders needed to make the 25-mile-long trip into Beaufort, the county seat, they often hitched rides on the mailboat.

When her grandfather was young, Rosa told me, the islanders made their livings by fishing, waterfowl hunting and going to sea. “They lived off the water,” she said.

Times were not easy. When Cicero was growing up, almost all the young men left the island at one time or another. Many went to sea; some joined the life-saving service; others found jobs in one maritime trade or another elsewhere on the East Coast.

The Luckenbach Steamship Company

Nobody remembers exactly when Cicero left Cedar Island for the first time. But according to his World War I draft registration card, he was still in Carteret County and serving as the first mate on a boat called the Storm King in 1914.

A photograph (below) also shows him serving on the Virginian, a harbor tug based in Norfolk. The photograph is undated, but was taken sometime prior to his service on the Luckenbach.

Cicero apparently found his post on the Luckenbach late in 1914 or early in 1915. Rosa told me that one of his cousins, evidently already serving on a tug, helped to get him the job.

Built at the Neafie and Levy shipyard in Philadelphia in 1899, the Edward Luckenbach was based in Norfolk, Virginia, and worked up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

She was a big, tough boat: 135-feet long, 400 gross tons in weight, steel hulled, and powered by 900 HP steam engines. She was not a harbor tug; she was made for the open sea.

She was owned by the Luckenbach Steamship Company, which had its headquarters in New York City. The company’s founder—and the namesake of the oceangoing tug on which Cicero Goodwin sailed—was a German immigrant named Edward Luckenbach.

Luckenbach got his start in the maritime trades as what they used to call “a canal man.” In his younger days, he ran coal barges mainly on the canals that ran between Philadelphia and New York City.

He eventually began to invest in bigger vessels. In the late 1800s, he built up a sizable fleet of oceangoing tugs and barges that specialized in hauling coal from Norfolk, Virginia, to New York City and Boston.

(Rosa recalled that sometimes the Luckenbach also made trips as far south as Cuba when her grandfather served on her.)

When Edward Luckenbach died in 1904, one of his obituaries described him as “probably the largest individual tugboat and barge owner on the Atlantic coast.” The company continued to prosper after his death.

“Most were foreigners”

Cicero Goodwin was 25 years old that spring of 1915. He and his wife Celia were renting an apartment in Norfolk and returning home to Cedar Island to see friends and family when they could. Celia was also from Roe, and they had grown up together.

At that time, the Edward Luckenbach’s captain was William E. Umstead, a 34-year-old seaman who lived in Norfolk with his wife and two daughters,  one age 14 months, the other a 15-year old.

Capt. Umstead’s crew came from maritime communities as far north as the Hudson River and as far south as Cedar Island. His first officer, Harry Olsen, was the oldest hand on the boat.

Olsen was 55 years old. He and his wife and five children lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., but he had been doing to sea for more than 30 years. He had served on the Luckenbach during her first voyage in 1899, and he had apparently stayed with her ever since.

The rest of the crew included chief engineer Benjamin Hederer, who was from Castleton-on-the-Hudson, a village on the Hudson River southeast of Albany, New York. The second engineer, George C. Boyce, was from Newport News, just across the James River from Norfolk.

Cicero Goodwin’s younger brother, Dallas A. Goodwin, was also one of the Edward Luckenbach’s seamen. He was only 19 years old in 1915. He worked on deck alongside three other men whom I found listed as Carl Frederick, J. Ballis, and L. Meale.

Two other sailors, Earl Augustus Laats and a man whose last name was Walenius, were the tug’s oilers. Judging by their last names, both were likely Norwegian, Swedish or Dutch immigrants.

Also judging by last names, other Norwegian, Swedish or Dutch sailors were serving on the Luckenbach in 1915 as well. At that time, Scandinavian immigrants made up a large part of the maritime workforce on the Eastern Seaboard.

As the Brooklyn Times-Union (5 April 1915) rather stiffly put it, “It is believed that most of the [Luckenbach’s crew] were foreigners.”

The Luckenbach’s crew also included men by the names of Falk, Walz, Olsen, and Nelson, whose jobs it was to tend to the tug’s boilers. Another man, William F. Murray of Norfolk, was the boat’s steward. A young black man named Worrell served as a mess boy.

The Luckenbach’s Barges

The last voyage of the Edward Luckenbach began on the first day of April 1915.

On that day, the Luckenbach left New York City, having unloaded three barges of bituminous coal at the city’s docks. Coming out of the harbor, she headed back to Norfolk “traveling light,” meaning that she had her empty barges in tow.

The barges were in tow, but they did carry small crews, probably of three or four seamen each. On that run from New York City to Norfolk, the Luckenbach’s barges were the West Point, the William H. Macey, and the Josephus.

The Luckenbach’s barges had no similarity at all to the kind of low, flat, rectangular barges that we so often see tugboats towing on the Intracoastal Waterway today.

Instead, they were old sailing ships, relics of the last days of the Age of Sail.  Their owners had managed to find a niche for them in a new age of maritime commerce as bulk carriers of coal.

 At that time, old sailing ships converted into bulk carriers were common sights in seaports along the East Coast. Some remained under sail. Others were towed by oceangoing tugboats such as the Luckenbach. Fleets of them hauled coal; others hauled bulk cargos such as lumber, grain, and phosphate rock.

All of the Luckenbach’s barges fit that bill. Built as a merchant sailing ship in 1866, the West Point was 226 feet, 6 inches in length and weighed a hefty 1,213 tons. The Josephus was even larger. Built as a schooner in Newcastle, Maine, in 1876, she weighed in at 1,406 gross tons.

The Luckenbach’s third barge, the William H. Macey, was no less a sailor.  She was a big, 3-masted schooner and had rounded Cape Horn more than once in her younger, friskier days.

A Late Season Blizzard

 Three days into the Luckenbach’s passage to Norfolk, on the 3^rd of April, 1915, one of the worst nor’easters in memory swept down out of the North Atlantic. When the storm hit, the Luckenbach was somewhere off the capes that form the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay.

The storm seemed to come of nowhere, unseasonably cold, fierce, and wicked.

Hurricane-force winds and a wall of driving snow and sleet hit the Luckenbach and her barges. For much of the Eastern Seaboard, it was the biggest April snowstorm on record: cities as far apart as Raleigh, N.C., and New York City got 10 inches or more of snow.

The Luckenbach was in the worst of the storm. Pummeled by high winds, waves breaking across her deck, and a heavy, sticky snow, the tug’s crew struggled to make any headway at all.

In the wind and waves, Capt. Umstead’s crew fought to hold onto the barges. The strain on the tug’s hawser was immense though, and eventually the cable parted, separating the tug from the barges and sending the barges helter-skelter into the storm.

The situation grew worse. As Capt. Umstead and his men struggled to recover the barges, the storm’s waves carried away the Luckenbach’s steering gear. With her rudder rendered useless, the tug was at the storm’s mercy.

An official account of the Luckenbach’s wreck later appeared in the Annual Report of the United States Coast Guard for 1915. That account was based largely on Cicero Goodwin’s testimony.

The Cedar Islander told a Coast Guard investigator that Capt. Umstead and the crew tried to anchor the Luckenbach at sea after they lost their steering. Their attempt failed however: the weather was too severe. The tug lost both her sea anchor and her chain.

The crew rigged a jury mast, but it was not enough; they could neither steer nor heave to. At that point, Cicero and his shipmates knew that they were headed onto the shoals. They began putting on lifejackets, readying the tug’s two lifeboats, and saying their prayers.

No man who worked on oceangoing tugboats in that day and time was a stranger to the perils that faced them in a storm like the Good Friday nor’easter of 1915.

At least one of the Luckenbach’s crewmen, the first mate Harry Olsen, had served on the tug when a no less harrowing nor’easter hit her in Long Island Sound a decade earlier, in January 1904.

On that winter night, the storm’s waves had pounded the Luckenbach so badly that the towlines had given way and she was separated from the eight coal barges that she was towing and their crews.

Only an almost miraculous night’s work by the Luckenbach’s crew kept there from being any loss of life. Even then they would likely not have succeeded without the help of the Abram P. Skidmore, a tug that came to their rescue out of Bridgeport, Conn.

Aboard the Luckenbach in 1915, at least First Mate Olsen must have been thinking about that night in 1904.

As salt spray and an icy snow covered her deck, the storm drove the Luckenbach south past Cape Charles.

The Last Hours of the Prins Maurits

Cicero Goodwin and his shipmates were not alone in the storm. All around them, other vessels were also caught in the blizzard and struggling for survival.

Just to their north, another oceangoing tug, the Cumberland, was in trouble off Cape Henlopen, Delaware. She would lose ten men when a pair of her coal barges broke away and ran aground.

To the south, a distress call had gone out from the Dutch cargo/passenger steamer Prins Maurits. She was last reported 90 miles northeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. She was never seen again, all 45 passengers and 4 crewmen presumed dead.

Thirteen men on board the barge Tampico, which the storm left adrift off the North Carolina coast, were also lost.

Storm battered vessels were adrift throughout that part of the Atlantic. Off the Outer Banks, a Russian steamer, the Altair, rescued the crew of a disabled schooner, the M. E. Cressy. A Morgan line steamer called the Comus rescued the crew of the barge Northwestern.

Also off the Outer Banks, the steamer Lenape came to the aid of the captain and six-man crew of the schooner Alice Murphy. By the time they were rescued, they had all been lashed to the mizzenmast for 36 hours.

There would be many other rescues that day and the next day, and many attempts at rescues, too. Across much of the Eastern Seaboard, fishing boats, planking and fishermen’s nets littered the ocean beaches.

False Cape Shoal

As the Edward Luckenbach was blown toward shore, Capt. Umstead and his crew were helpless. The storm blew the tug past the inlet that they usually would have taken into the coal-loading depot at Lambert’s Point on the outskirts of Norfolk.

Lambert’s Point was the site of the Norfolk and Western Railway’s coal loading dock. In the early 20^th century, Norfolk was the largest coal exporting port on the East Coast and most of that coal was shipped out of Lambert’s Point.

The majority of that coal had been mined in the mountains of West Virginia and transported to Norfolk by rail.

Passing the inlet into Norfolk. the Luckenbach continued to be blown south. Around 1:30 PM that afternoon, a towering wave crashed down on her, pouring water into her hold and and dousing the engine’s fires. The tug finally came to rest with a shudder on a shoal 28 miles below Virginia Beach.

The Luckenbach hit the shoal 400 yards off a largely deserted stretch of ocean beach. The location was approximately midway between two United States Coast Guard stations: 3 or 4 miles from the False Cape Station to the south and about the same distance from the Little Island Station to the north.

 The site of the Luckenbach’s grounding was approximately 5 miles from of the North Carolina Line.

The snow was still coming down hard. The waves pounding the Luckenbach made a noise like thunderclaps and almost immediately the tugboat sank down onto the shoal until only the smokestack and her two masts were visible above the surf.

According to Cicero Goodwin’s testimony, the ocean water flooded through the tug’s hull so rapidly that the crew never had a chance to launch the lifeboats. The force of the water smashed the boats together, splintering them and killing one of his shipmates who was caught between them.

Most of the surviving crewmen rushed onto the roof of the tug’s wheelhouse, which apparently was covered or nearly covered with water but not deeply. The steward, William Murphy, did not make it, however. He was in the galley when the boat struck and drowned there.

There are some discrepancies about what happened next in the varying accounts of the wreck. The official Coast Guard report and the accounts published in The Virginian-Pilot, New York Times and other newspapers vary a fair bit in a few details.

The overall story though is clear: most of the Luckenbach’s crew huddled on top of the wheelhouse and clung to the railing while wind, waves, and snow beat against them.

By all accounts, the waves were as high as the crosstrees on the tug’s masts. As the breakers came down on the wreck, they completely submerged the crewmen on top of the wheelhouse.

Cicero Goodwin later recounted that he watched one shipmate after another grow exhausted from the cold and the pounding of the waves, until they lost their grips and were washed away.

“One by one my shipmates vanished before my eyes,” the New York Tribune later quoted him. “The waves beat against us every minute, and how I held on so long I do not know.”

He also saw his brother Dallas washed away. Dallas had lashed himself to one of the tug’s masts with his belt, but the walls of water hitting him eventually broke the belt in two.

“Goodwin wept as he talked,” the reporter from the New York Tribune wrote in the paper’s April 5^th edition.

The Survivors

The official Coast Guard report indicated that Cicero somehow held onto the wheelhouse’s railing for another hour, but eventually grew too weak and was washed overboard.

He was swept down the beach by the southerly current. Unlike the tug’s other hands however, he was still alive when a patrolman from the False Cape Station discovered him in the surf. The patrolman found him unconscious or barely conscious.

When the patrolman found him, Cicero was still lying in the surf break, the waves coming and going around him. He had apparently been too exhausted to crawl up to the dry part of the beach.

The patrolman lifted the fallen seaman into a horse-drawn cart and carried him down the beach toward the Coast Guard station. Cicero later recalled that he must have begun to wake up at that time; he remembered the jiggling of the cart.

According to a report in the Newport News Daily Press (7 April 1915), he did not fully recover his senses for two hours.

At that point, only Capt. Umstead and Harry Olsen remained on board the Luckenbach. Both were lashed high on the tug’s foremast.

When a rescue party from the Little Island Station arrived on the beach, they found the pair clinging there. Even at that height, the waves still rolled over Capt. Umstead, who was the lower of the two men. Both were half-frozen from the snow and ice.

A crew from the False Cape Station, soon joined the crew from Little Island on the beach opposite the Luckenbach. Capt. J. W. Partridge, of the Little River station, was apparently the senior officer on the scene and took command.

The storm was still so powerful that they thought it impossible to get a rescue boat through the surf. They attempted to execute a breeches buoy rescue instead.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard’s report, Capt. Partridge and his men tried but failed repeatedly to secure a line between the beach and the Luckenbach. Even when they got close, Umstead and Olsen were evidently too weary and frozen to reach out and grab the line.

After a seventh attempt failed, the coast guardsmen saw the lower figure on the mast fall into the sea.

Some accounts said that Capt. Umstead jumped and was making a desperate attempt to swim to safety. Other accounts described him as succumbing to exhaustion and falling into the sea. All accounts made clear that he did not make it to shore.

With the snow still falling and a 75-mile-an-hour gale blowing, Capt. Partridge called a halt to their rescue efforts as it grew dark. The surfmen from the Little Island station left the scene to go to another rescue two miles to the north.

Convinced that the lone figure lashed to the Luckenbach’s mast was no longer alive, the men from the False Cape Station also eventually left the scene. They were not done for the night though. After receiving a distress call, they went to the aid of yet another vessel.

Their work was still not done . At daybreak, after completing the other rescue, the keeper of the False Cape Station sent a surfman back to the site of the wreck of the Luckenbach.

Much to his surprise, the surfman discovered that the man in the foremast was still alive. He quickly alerted his station, where the keeper and crew soon returned to the wreck of the Luckenbach. Surfmen from Little River also joined them.

Wind and waves were still pounding the shore, but this time they believed that the storm had lessened enough for them to attempt to take a surfboat through the waves to reach the man.

All morning the storm’s breakers kept them from reaching the Luckenbach. Again and again, they were capsized or thrown back onto the beach. But sometime after noon, a crew of seven men was finally able to get a boat through the surf and to the Luckenbach.

In contemporary accounts of the incident, the men manning the surfboat that day are listed as A. L. Barco, H. N. Holmes, L. E. Newbern, Joseph Etheridge, Bennett Malbon, C. H. Wharton and P. F. Henley.

When they reached the Luckenbach, they found Olsen still lashed to the mast, exhausted and frozen. They maneuvered the boat under him, and the last of the tugboat’s crewmen fell into their arms.

According to the Virginian Pilot (5 April 1915), “Those who saw the rescue pronounced it one of the most heroic and most difficult ever known on the Atlantic coast.”

The Josephus, the West Point and the William H. Macey

The crews of the Luckenbach’s barges fared better than the crew of the big tug. The crews of the Josephus and West Point both managed to get anchors to hold and rode out the storm at sea. After the wind and waves died down, they were safely towed into Norfolk.

The other barge, the William H. Macey, did wreck, but with no loss of life. She broke up on a shoal near the little settlement of Wash Woods, just above the North Carolina Line. In a daring rescue, surfmen from the Coast Guard’s Wash Woods Station managed to carry the captain and his three-man crew off the barge using a breeches buoy.

The William H. Macey’s steward, Carl Eckerman, later told a newspaper reporter that “the storm was the worst experience in his life and that he was thankful that he was alive and able to tell the tale.”

“I am Saved”

Only Harry Olsen and Cicero Goodwin survived the wreck of the Edward Luckenbach. Both were apparently hospitalized in Norfolk before recovering and going home. Olsen, while still in the hospital, sent an optimistic telegram to his wife in Brooklyn.

According to the Brooklyn Eagle (5 April 1915), the telegram read: “I am saved. Will reach home Wednesday, April 7. HARRY.”

The newspaper reported that “Mrs. Olson was one of the happiest women in Brooklyn today.”

Capt. Umstead was laid to rest in Norfolk a few days later. The brother of 2^nd engineer George Boyce drove an automobile down the beach to the site of the wreck. He retrieved his brother’s body and took it back to Newport News for burial.

Earl Laats was also buried in Norfolk, a Lutheran minister presiding. He was one of the Luckenbach’s seamen that I presume was a Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish immigrant, and he apparently only had his brother with him here in the United States. If that is correct, I do not like to think about the letter that his brother had to write to their family back on the other side of the Atlantic.

Other members of the Luckenbach’s crew either had no family or had no family that was local to claim their bodies. They were buried by the sea, either in the dunes opposite the wreck site or in those that surrounded the False Cape Life-Saving Station.

For most of those drowned seamen it was their final resting place, but not for all of them.

According to the Virginian-Pilot (18 April 1915), a week or two after the shipwreck, a Miss Goldie Ross of West Carrollton, Ohio, came south in search of the body of Carl Frederick. He was one of the Luckenbach’s deckhands buried near the wreck site.

A Norfolk fraternal society, the Knights of Pythias, arranged to have Frederick’s body disinterred and brought to her in Norfolk.

The newspaper explained: “Miss Ross and Frederick were engaged to be married this summer and when Miss Ross learned of his death she traveled a thousand miles to claim his body and take it home.”

In a warm lilting voice now grown a bit weak with age, Rosa Chance Croom Johnson told me that her grandfather Cicero did not turn away from the sea after the wreck of the Luckenbach.

“He was tough,” she said. And we both knew: people from Cedar Island are no strangers to the ways of the sea. No matter how hard it is, at least in my experience, they learn to know and live with what the sea gives and know and live with what the sea takes away.

Rosa told me that her grandfather was still serving on oceangoing tugs at least as late as the Second World War. She even remembers her family talking about a hair-raising encounter that he had with a German U-boat that was hunting merchant ships along the East Coast in the early part of the war.

Rosa told me that her grandfather was certainly still working on tugs during those childhood summers that she used to spend with her grandmother on Cedar Island.

When Rosa and I talked, she recalled the joy of his homecomings, when he returned to Cedar Island to see his family.

“First thing he wanted to do is give you something,” she said, smiling at the memory.

She remembered her grandfather as being a bighearted man and having a good sense of humor.  He lived to be 93 years old, and he always loved to tell stories about his adventures at sea.

But Rosa also told me that, in all those years she knew him, she never heard her grandfather say a word about the big nor’easter of 1915 and the last hours of the Luckenbach.

 “They were a close-mouthed people,” Rosa explained, and that day was just too painful for him, she said.

Her words made me think about the memories that we all carry around inside us, both those that bring us comfort and joy, and those that have left scars and wounds that no one else can see.

There are some things we cannot know, but I am deeply grateful to my old neighbor Betsy Olkowski and to her husband Steve’s aunt, Rosa Chance Croom Johnson, for sharing the story of Cicero Goodwin and the wreck of the Luckenbach with me.

Thanks to them, the memory of the Edward Luckenbach and that stormy Good Friday of 1915 will not be lost.