About 20 island residents  sat in one of the gallery spaces of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras village on Wednesday night, Oct. 28, eager to share their stories, concerns, and ideas with the folks who are going to be designing and conceptualizing the exhibits at the museum.

The museum, which has been in the planning for the better part of two decades and has been under construction for about 10 years, will be completed by the end of the year, according to executive director Joe Schwarzer.

What remains is the work of designing and mounting the exhibits – and raising the additional funds to get that done.

In charge of that crucial part of the museum are the architects of Raleigh-based Peace, Brinkley, Cease and Lee (PBC&L), working in concert with the Boston-based, internationally recognized exhibition design firm of Christopher Chadbourne and Associates (CCA).

The firms’ proposal beat out about 45 other applicants from California to Great Britain.

After representatives from PBC&L and CCA gave brief presentations at last week’s meeting, the floor was open for public comment, and the public didn’t hold back.

Stories, ideas, and forgotten historical tidbits started flowing almost immediately.

Buxton resident Danny Couch suggested that the exhibit designers, who are known for their use of technology in creating interactive spaces, design an exhibit that puts people on a shipwreck and lets them weather a coastal storm.

Hatteras native Dixie Browning talked about the stories she’d heard growing up of the lifesavers—brave men, taking their small boats out into the rough weather to help those in danger.

“Something that could carry that drama would be perfect,” she said.

Ernie Foster, Hatteras native, owner of the Albatross fleet, and captain of the Albatross III, said he hoped the story of the U.S. Life-Saving Service would be well told at the museum.

He also said that he hoped the exhibits would not just tell the story of the shipwrecks, but would also tell the story of how shipwrecks and shipwreck salvaging were integral parts of life on the island.

“Nothing cleared a church out faster than someone yelling ‘Ship ashore!’” he joked, adding that two of his doors and his dining room table had come off shipwrecks.

Over the course of the two-hour meeting, the subject of wars, lifesaving, African-American history, commercial fishing, maritime mysteries, and the cultural impact of shipwrecks were addressed.

There’s huge potential here,” said Chris Tebbutt, one of the designers with CCA. “This museum has the goods. There are so many stories to tell, it’s going to make our job easy.”

Tebbutt said it would take at least six months to complete the conceptual design, and David Francis, with PBC&L, said that it could take an additional six months to one year to complete the documentation.

The museum has approximately 2,000 artifacts right now and will receive artifacts from the Monitor and National Park Service collections.

As of right now, the project has received two grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, totaling about $400,000, and  museum officials said they expect that that will take them through the design phase.

After that, the state will contract out the fabrication of the exhibits.

“There’s no current funding in place for any of the actual fabrication,” said Steven Miller, facility construction architect with the Department of Cultural Resources in Raleigh.

In order to complete the exhibits, the museum will need to raise an estimated $2.5 to $3 million in additional funds.

Schwarzer said he is hoping to get funds from NOAA, the state, and the Park Service, but said that, at this point, the design teams were the key—that their designs would go a long way in helping with fundraising opportunities.

“We want to do this right,” he said.