Why was 1918 so momentous here and everywhere?

In early April 1918 - 102 years ago and the same year as the end of World War I and the deadly Spanish flu pandemic - a powerful northeast storm put the tugboat Eastern out of New York City in treacherous straits as it made its way down the coast.

The tug pulled two vessels being used as barges: the Severn and the Merrimac. The wind and seas wouldn’t allow the Eastern’s captain to maneuver his barges into the protection of the Harbor of Refuge in the mouth of Delaware Bay off Cape Henlopen. To save his own vessel, the skipper had to cut the two barges loose. The angry sea eventually pushed the renegade vessels up on the beach at Rehoboth, at the end of Brooklyn Avenue.

Salvage teams were able to haul the Severn off the beach but no such luck with the Merrimac. She was eventually cut down to the sand level and hauled away.

But enough of the vessel remained in place to arrest the progress of another ship blown ashore by a hurricane in 1944. The steel-hulled coal ship Thomas Tracy likewise had to be salvaged for her metal and parts and cut down to the sand. Remnants of both vessels remain to this day below the sand off of Brooklyn Avenue.

This photograph of the Merrimac on the beach in 1918 appears on a postcard that was mailed from the resort in 1918.