Museum of the Sea

Photos by Casey Robertson / Story by Arabella Saunders

When Wilmington-based architect John Parker recalls the idyllic summer days he spent vacationing on Hatteras Island as a child, he thinks of shipwrecks. Washed-up boats stuck on the shore, lying on their sides with exposed, rib-like wooden frames jutting out of the sand.

To an eight-year-old, those wrecks were a make-believe paradise – his very own seaside jungle gym.

Decades later, nearly 15 years into his career as an architect, John would call on these memories while designing the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras Village – which not only tells the stories of the thousands of shipwrecks off the coast of the Outer Banks, but resembles a massive capsized ship itself.

Cruising past the ferry docks and straight down Museum Drive, it’s hard not to take your eyes off the road to gape at the museum. The 18,768-square-foot structure is raised safely above sea level, and, despite its picture-perfect view of a beach access to the east, is only dotted with a few small windows.

It almost looks daunting, this massive museum – especially after driving past the rickety old wood-paneled houses in Mirlo Beach and the mega-mansion summer rentals scattered along Highway 12.

But there’s a lighthearted feel to the structure as well. The roof has a subtle arch to it, and the front of the museum is dotted with 14 curved beams that mimic the frame of a ship, just like the wooden ribs of the beached boats John often climbed as a child.

“I was probably eight or nine when my family would pack up our station wagon and drive out to the lighthouse, where there was always a ship or two lying in the sand on the beach,” John says. “So that imagery was very clear to me.”

The curved wooden beams gracing the front of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum were designed to mimic the frame of a ship. Located near the end of the road on Hatteras Island, the museum resembles a massive capsized ship – but was built to withstand even themost volatile weather.

Talks of building the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum began in the mid-‘80s in response to the need for space that could house North Carolina’s historical maritime artifacts – specifically the recently recovered U.S.S. Monitor, the United States Navy’s first ironclad ship that sank in a storm off of Cape Hatteras in 1862.

“It was a community effort at the time, like a grassroots movement,” explains Josh Nonnenmocher, the museum’s administrative coordinator. “The Mariner’s Museum in Newport News initially got the Monitor artifacts, and that’s when the community decided it was time to start a local museum so that those things had a place to go in the future.”

Over the next 15 years, organizers secured federal, state and local funding, and plans for the museum began to unfold. At first, many pictured a sprawling Victorian style structure similar to the Pea Island Lifesaving Station as the ideal place to house the collected artifacts.

But after meeting with the museum board while touring old Outer Banks’ duck hunting clubs for a separate architectural project, John had a different idea. Luckily, the board was responsive. Construction of John’s shipwreck-inspired building began in December 1999, and the museum opened its doors to visitors a little over two years later.

While John’s suggestion for an out-of-the-box design was met with open arms, one of the board’s requirements was non-negotiable, however: The museum needed to be hurricane-proof…or as close to it as possible.

With two-foot thick, double reinforced concrete walls, structural support beams dug 11 feet in the ground, a two-foot-thick aluminum metal roof, and long-lasting wood-alternative siding, the museum can withstand sustained winds of 135 miles per hour and gusts of up to 250 miles per hour, according to its official engineering letter.

In addition, the museum has a backup generator with a 6,000-gallon fuel tank that can power the entire building, including its full kitchen.

“If a zombie apocalypse ever happens, I’ll be glad to have this building,” Josh says with a laugh.

For John, the purpose of the museum’s design is two-fold. It’s both a playful callback to his childhood memories as well as a smart structural design that can brave the volatile weather Hatteras Village is all too familiar with.

But if you ask Josh about the museum’s design, he’ll tell you that it also evokes something much more than childhood nostalgia and weather-conscious construction. “I think that it speaks to the value of shipwrecks,” Josh says of the building and the invaluable collection it contains. “People are starting to focus more on underwater archeology in general and the landscape of a shipwreck – what led up to it, what sort of technology was involved, what went wrong.

“There’s a tremendous amount of information that can be taken away from these things,” he adds. “They’re simply like moments frozen in time.”