Tides of War: The Civil War Along the Grand Strand

Most people who come to the Grand Strand come for the same things that have always drawn people here — the wide, unhurried beaches, the smell of salt air, the sound of the Atlantic working through the night. They drive down Highway 17 past the seafood restaurants and the putt-putt courses and the vacation rental signs, and they do not think much about what the land once held. The war does not announce itself here the way it does in Virginia or Tennessee, where the battlefields are preserved and the cannon barrels are set in permanent rows. On the Grand Strand, the Civil War left quieter marks — earthwork walls disappearing slowly into pine forest, a rusting smokestack stubbing up through the tidal mud of Winyah Bay, a historical marker on a highway median pointing toward a Confederate fort that most drivers have never noticed.

But the war was very much here. From the moment South Carolina became the first state to secede in December 1860, the coast between Little River and Georgetown found itself at the front edge of a naval conflict that would last four years. This was not the war of Gettysburg and Antietam — massed armies meeting in open fields. This was a war of tides and inlets, of gunboats moving in the dark, of Confederate soldiers boiling seawater over open flame to keep the army fed, of men slipping across the water toward freedom. It was fought in marshes and salt grass, on wooden docks and sandy bluffs, aboard ships that could be heard from shore on still nights. And when it ended, it ended right here — with a mine rising from the mud of a bay, and a flagship going down in five minutes, and a proclamation being carried into a courthouse to tell thousands of people that they were legally free.

This is America’s 250th anniversary year, and across the nation communities are reckoning with the long arc of national history — the promises made, the promises broken, the work still unfinished. Along the Grand Strand, that reckoning runs through rice fields and ruined earthworks, through the Gullah Geechee heritage of the Waccamaw Neck, through a sunken ship that still breaks the surface of Winyah Bay at low tide. The Civil War shaped this coast more profoundly than most visitors ever realize. This is what it looked like from the water.

A Coast at War: The Grand Strand in 1861

In the spring of 1861, when the war began, the upper South Carolina coast was one of the wealthiest stretches of land in the American South — and one of the most deeply bound to the institution of slavery. Georgetown County, which anchors the southern end of the Grand Strand, was home to some of the largest rice plantations in the entire country. Joshua Ward, whose operations spread across the Waccamaw River bottomlands near what is now Brookgreen Gardens, had owned more than a thousand enslaved people by 1850 — making his estate the largest slaveholding operation in the United States at that time. The Waccamaw Neck, the long peninsula between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic, was lined with plantation houses whose wealth had been built entirely on the labor of people held in bondage. In 1860, enslaved people made up 85 percent of Georgetown County’s total population of 21,305.

To the north, Horry County — the county that contains what is today Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach — was less wealthy but no less connected to the Confederate cause. The county had its own farms, its own modest commerce, its own young men who would march off to regiments with names like the Waccamaw Light Artillery. The coast here was studded with inlets — Little River, Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island — that offered Confederate supply runners a maze of shallow channels the Union Navy’s larger ships could not easily follow.

When President Lincoln declared a naval blockade of Confederate ports in April 1861, the Grand Strand suddenly became a military theater. The blockade targeted the major ports of Charleston and Wilmington first, but the dozens of smaller inlets between them became outlets — and targets — almost immediately. For the Confederacy, keeping those inlets open was a matter of survival. For the Union Navy, closing them was part of a methodical campaign to strangle Southern supply lines from the sea.

Salt and Survival: The War’s Most Unglamorous Weapon

Before refrigeration, salt was not a seasoning — it was a food preservation technology. Without it, armies could not be fed. Meat spoiled. Pork could not be cured. Fish could not be stored. When the Union blockade cut off the South’s commercial salt supply, the Confederacy’s need for domestic production became urgent in a way that is difficult to fully appreciate from a modern vantage point. A commodity that had cost about twenty cents a bag before the war eventually commanded prices equivalent to hundreds of dollars as the conflict dragged on.

The Grand Strand was ideal for salt production. The process was primitive but effective: seawater was pumped into large iron pots or shallow evaporation pans set along the shore, then heated over open flames until the water boiled away and left crystalline salt behind. Ted Gragg, longtime curator of the South Carolina Civil War Museum in Myrtle Beach, described the operation plainly — the pots were heated over open flame, the water evaporated, and the salt remained. Small works operated up and down the coast: at Little River, at Withers Swash near what is now Myrtle Beach’s Family Kingdom amusement park, at Murrells Inlet, at Pawleys Island, and at points in between.

The Union Navy understood exactly what these operations meant and went after them systematically. On July 21, 1863, Union gunboats destroyed an extensive salt works at Murrells Inlet that was reportedly capable of producing thirty to forty bushels of salt per day — the operation belonging to a planter named LaBruce who had partnered with a Confederate artillery captain named Ward. Less than a year later, on April 23, 1864, a Union raiding party from the gunboat USS Ethan Allen struck the salt works at Withers Swash in what is now Myrtle Beach. A Marine squadron came ashore and destroyed the entire plant — three warehouses and 2,000 bushels of stored salt. Gragg noted the historical footnote: it marked the first land invasion ever conducted by the United States Marine Corps, a distinction that attaches itself today to a stretch of coast most visitors associate with beachside amusement parks.

In April 1864, a Union ship found and destroyed another salt works at Little River, breaking the production pans and burning the buildings. The Confederate response was determined but never sufficient. After the destruction at Murrells Inlet in 1863, a group of about twenty-five men drove the Union forces back, but the salt works had already been reduced to wreckage. Each time a works was rebuilt, the Navy would return.

Blockade Runners and Shadow Ports

While the salt works drew Union attention from one direction, the inlets of the Grand Strand were simultaneously serving a second military purpose: receiving blockade runners. When the Union Navy locked down Charleston and Wilmington, smaller and faster ships began slipping through the many shallow inlets along the coast between the two cities — Winyah Bay, Murrells Inlet, the North and South Santee Rivers, and Little River Inlet were all actively used throughout the war. These runners moved between the Confederate coast and trading points in Nassau, Havana, and Bermuda, bringing in war supplies and carrying out cotton, turpentine, resin, and lumber.

Murrells Inlet’s shallow draft and multiple channels made it especially useful for this kind of work. The inlet had always been a working waterway — its planters had their own dock access, and the idea of moving goods quietly through its back channels was not new. During the war, Confederate forces established small fortifications at the inlet to protect the runners, and the Union Navy maintained a persistent blockading presence offshore to intercept them. Federal records document considerable blockade running activity in the Little River inlet as well, with runners bringing in valuable military supplies and departing with cargo that could be traded in island ports for the hard currency the Confederacy desperately needed.

The fall of 1863 produced a particularly violent episode. A group of Confederate cavalry captured Northern sailors who had come ashore to burn a beached blockade runner. In December of the same year, Admiral John Dahlgren of the U.S. South Atlantic Blockading Squadron dispatched six warships and hundreds of troops with orders to destroy Murrells Inlet entirely. A storm blew the fleet off course — a piece of meteorological luck for the inlet’s defenders — but one ship still managed to shell the waterfront and set fire to a blockade runner loaded with turpentine, while sailors from the USS Ethan Allen landed and destroyed 2,000 bushels of Confederate salt. The inlet took the blow and kept operating.

Fort Randall: Cushing’s Midnight Raid on Little River

On Tilghman Point in Little River Neck — the peninsula across the water from what is now the small harbor town of Little River — the Confederates built a fortification to protect the inlet’s blockade-running traffic. Fort Randall was not a large installation: its design included a blockhouse pierced for musketry and earthworks surrounded by a ditch about ten feet broad and five feet deep. Captain Thomas Daggett of the Waccamaw Light Artillery installed two six-inch cannons there and also commanded a secondary position, Fort Ward, believed to have been situated in Murrells Inlet. The two forts together represented the Confederate effort to hold the northern coastline of the Grand Strand against Union naval incursion.

In January 1863, those defenses were tested by one of the more audacious figures of the Union naval war. Lieutenant William Barker Cushing was twenty years old, a man who seemed constitutionally unable to decline a dangerous assignment. He would later become famous for sinking the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle with a torpedo launched from an open boat — but in January 1863 he was operating along the South Carolina coast with three small cutters and twenty-five men, hunting for blockade-running pilots.

Cushing crossed the bar at eight o’clock at night and proceeded up the river. After meeting light resistance, he beached the boats and formed his men about two hundred yards from Fort Randall. Then, knowing the defenders were unaware of how few Union men there actually were, he charged with the bayonet. The Confederates scrambled over the opposite wall as the Union sailors came over theirs. Cushing reported capturing their stores, clothing, ammunition, and part of their arms, destroying what he could not carry away. He pushed further up the river, encountered another skirmish, ran out of ammunition, and withdrew — losing only one man, shot in the leg. The Confederates returned to Fort Randall after the raid, and the fort remained in Confederate hands until its abandonment.

The remnants of Fort Randall are still visible to alert boaters on the Intracoastal Waterway near Cherry Grove Beach and Little River. A historical marker on Sea Mountain Highway near North Myrtle Beach commemorates the fort and Cushing’s raid — positioned, with some irony, steps from the Cherry Grove Beach off-ramp, where today’s visitors are typically focused on entirely different matters.

Murrells Inlet Under Fire

Today Murrells Inlet is South Carolina’s self-proclaimed Seafood Capital — a mile of waterfront restaurants stretching along the Marshwalk, pelicans working the pilings, boats coming in at dusk with whatever the day gave them. The inlet is one of the most pleasant places on the South Carolina coast. It has a deep, settled quality to it, the kind of place that feels like it has always known what it is.

During the Civil War, it knew something altogether different. The inlet was a Confederate supply port and a salt-production center, which made it a recurring target for the Union South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The Navy came after it again and again — shelling the waterfront, destroying salt works and warehouses, burning blockade runners where they sat. The inlet’s geography, with its shallow channels and hidden creeks, made a full-scale Union assault difficult, and Confederate forces used that geography well. But the cumulative effect of the raids was real. The turpentine and resin and cotton that the inlet had once moved steadily through its trade channels became harder and harder to export as the blockade tightened.

The planters of the Waccamaw Neck, whose rice operations had made them some of the wealthiest people in the antebellum South, found themselves in an impossible position as the war dragged on. The enslaved workforce that had built and maintained their rice fields — clearing the tidal swamps, digging the miles of irrigation canals, managing the water through the growing season — was, in many cases, watching the Union gunboats pass offshore and drawing their own conclusions. Some fled to Union lines. Others remained while watching the old order begin its slow collapse around them.

If you walk the Grand Strand’s shore communities today and drive south toward Murrells Inlet, you pass through country where that history sits just beneath the surface. The marshes look the same as they did in the 1860s. The inlets cut through the same barrier islands. The rice field remnants are still there in the backwaters of the Waccamaw if you know where to look — long straight channels cut by hand into tidal swamp, the ghost infrastructure of an empire built on human bondage and destroyed by a war that could not be won.

Grand Strand Civil War Chronology: Key Events Along the Coast

Battery White: Georgetown’s Last Defense

If you drive south of Georgetown on Highway 17 and turn off toward the water at the right moment, you can find what is left of Battery White — a Confederate earthwork that sits on a residential property called Belle Isle on Mayrant’s Bluff, overlooking the broad blue expanse of Winyah Bay. The fortification is still largely intact, five hundred feet of earthen wall built on a bluff about twenty feet above the water where the main channel narrows to roughly 1,400 yards. Two original ten-inch Columbiad cannons remain on site, their barrels still pointing toward the bay. It is one of the most physically preserved Civil War sites in South Carolina, and most people who drive past the turnoff on Highway 17 have no idea it exists.

Battery White was built in 1862 under the direction of Major General John C. Pemberton, the Confederate commander of South Carolina and Georgia, who personally selected Mayrant’s Bluff as the site. The position was genuine in its strategic value. Any Union vessel attempting to move up Winyah Bay toward Georgetown would have to pass within range of the battery’s guns. Commanding Brigadier General J. H. Trapier called it almost impregnable with proper armament and manpower. The problem, which plagued Battery White throughout the war, was that the Confederacy never provided either.

In February 1863, the garrison stood at fifty-three men and nine guns. Trapier asked the Confederate government repeatedly for reinforcements and was repeatedly refused. The war’s more active theaters consumed what resources were available, and Battery White was left to defend Georgetown with whatever it had. By October 1864, the situation had deteriorated far enough that eleven Confederate soldiers deserted and gave detailed intelligence about the battery’s layout and weaknesses to Union Commander R. P. Swann. The fort that had been built to be impregnable was leaking information to the enemy before a single Union ship had entered the bay.

Battery White sits on land that was once Belle Isle Plantation — a property that had, in earlier times, been owned by Revolutionary War Colonel Peter Horry, whose own story is told in our article on Francis Marion and the Swamp Fox campaigns of Horry County. History has a way of layering itself on the same ground along this coast. The bluff that Horry once owned became the site of the last Confederate fortification standing between Georgetown and the Union fleet. When that fleet finally came, the guns of Battery White never fired.

The Fall of Georgetown and the End of Slavery on the Waccamaw

By February 1865, the Confederacy was collapsing on every front. Sherman’s army had crossed into South Carolina from Georgia and was cutting a burning path toward Columbia. Charleston, the cradle of secession, fell on February 17. Georgetown, watching the dominoes fall from its position on Winyah Bay, understood that its moment had come.

Confederate forces evacuated Georgetown on February 19, 1865. Battery White surrendered without firing a shot. On February 25, the Georgetown town council sent a letter of surrender to Admiral Dahlgren’s fleet, which was waiting in the harbor. Dahlgren’s reply was swift and unambiguous. His proclamation to the town began with a declaration that slavery was at an end and invited the residents to return to their ordinary lives as peaceable citizens. For the thousands of enslaved people on the rice plantations of the Waccamaw Neck — men and women and children whose labor had made Georgetown County one of the wealthiest places in antebellum America — the admiral’s words carried a weight that is difficult to overstate.

Georgetown County in 1865 was a place where the enslaved population had always constituted the overwhelming majority of the people who actually lived and worked there. In Georgetown District, estimates placed the proportion of enslaved residents at between 75 and 90 percent. The rice empire that had generated the county’s extraordinary wealth — the 780 miles of hand-dug canals, the thousands of acres of tidal swamp cleared and banked and irrigated by human labor, the global trade in Carolina Gold rice that had made Georgetown planters richer than almost anyone in the colonial and antebellum South — had been built entirely on the backs of people the law did not recognize as people.

The Gullah Geechee culture that had developed among those enslaved communities — a culture with deep West African roots, a distinct language, its own artistic traditions, its own foodways and spiritual practices — survived the planters who had tried to reduce its bearers to instruments of production. That culture is still alive today in the coastal communities of Georgetown County and the broader Lowcountry, a living inheritance from the people who built this landscape and were never fully credited for doing so. The shores and waterways of the Grand Strand carry that history even when the tourist economy seems to have buried it entirely.

Georgetown today preserves the memory of that moment more thoughtfully than most visitors expect. The Gullah Museum of Georgetown, the Rice Museum on Front Street, and the South Carolina Maritime Museum all engage with the deep history of the town and its county. Front Street itself, the old commercial heart of Georgetown, looks much as it did in the nineteenth century — a quiet grid of brick storefronts running parallel to the Sampit River, a town that history passed through more than once and left marks each time.

The Sinking of the USS Harvest Moon

The morning of March 1, 1865, started in fog. Fog over the live oaks on the banks of Winyah Bay. Fog over the silent guns of Battery White, abandoned now for nearly a week. Fog in Georgetown, where the Confederate soldiers were gone and the Union occupation had just begun. Admiral John Dahlgren, fifty-five years old and in command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, was pacing his cabin aboard the USS Harvest Moon as the ship prepared to get underway for Charleston. The table had been laid for breakfast. The war, by all appearances, was nearly over.

The Harvest Moon was a 193-foot sidewheel steamer — built originally as a passenger ferry on the coast of Maine, converted by the Navy in 1864 to serve as Dahlgren’s flagship. She had been the instrument of Georgetown’s surrender, carrying the admiral up Winyah Bay to accept the town’s capitulation and deliver his proclamation ending slavery in the county. Now, at shortly after seven in the morning, she weighed anchor off Battery White and began the trip back to Charleston.

At about 7:45 a.m., the ship struck a Confederate mine in the bay’s Swash Channel, roughly three miles southeast of Battery White. The explosion blew a hole through the starboard quarter and the main deck above it. The Harvest Moon sank in approximately five minutes in two and a half fathoms of water. One man died — John Hazard, a wardroom steward who, according to later accounts, was serving the admiral coffee when the explosion occurred. Dahlgren escaped uninjured. The crew transferred to the tug Clover and then to the USS Nipsic.

The mine that sank the Harvest Moon had been placed by Captain Thomas Daggett — the same man who had commanded Fort Randall and Fort Ward. Daggett had engineered the device in a second-floor room of a store on Georgetown’s Front Street owned by a man named Stephen Rouquie. The store building became part of what is now the Rice Museum. Daggett floated the mine out into the channel as the Harvest Moon made her way down the bay. It was one of the final acts of Confederate resistance on the South Carolina coast — a single mine, set by a mill engineer from Laurel Hill Plantation, sinking a Union flagship with the war a month from its end.

The wreck was stripped of valuable machinery in April 1865 and then abandoned. The Harvest Moon has been in Winyah Bay ever since. At low tide, the top of the smokestack still breaks the surface — rusty and barnacled, pointing up from the pluff mud, visible to anyone on the water who knows where to look. Rover Boat Tours in Georgetown runs excursions on Winyah Bay that pass the site. The South Carolina Maritime Museum on Front Street has exhibits on the ship and its final morning. It is one of the most tangible Civil War relics on the entire South Carolina coast — a ship that history put there and then left, a monument to a war that ended everywhere else but took a little longer to finish on this particular bay.

What the War Left Behind

The Civil War did not leave the Grand Strand with grand battlefield parks or famous monuments. What it left was subtler and, in some ways, more honest — a smokestack in a bay, earthwork walls on a residential bluff, a highway marker near a beach off-ramp, a set of rice field canals in the backwater that the marsh grass has almost completely reclaimed. The war that passed through here was fought at close range and in difficult terrain by people who left little behind except the marks they made on the land and the water.

For visitors traveling the Grand Strand today, the Civil War sites are not hard to reach if you know where to look. Battery White, near Georgetown, is open to visitors during daylight hours and worth the detour for its physical preservation alone. The South Carolina Maritime Museum on Front Street in Georgetown brings the story of the Harvest Moon to life with photographs, artifacts, and the kind of local scholarship that catches details the broad histories miss. The Rice Museum, also on Front Street, tells the larger story of Georgetown County’s rice empire and the enslaved people who built it — a story that runs directly through the Civil War years. Windy Hill and the northern sections of the Grand Strand sit on land that once held Fort Randall within sight of the water, and the Intracoastal Waterway still runs past the bluff where it stood.

In America’s 250th year, as the nation looks back at the full span of its history, the Grand Strand offers something quietly important: a Civil War story that is less about battles won and lost than about what the war was fundamentally for. It was fought here in salt pans and marshes and shallow-water channels over the survival of a system that enslaved hundreds of thousands of people, and it ended here with a proclamation on a dock and a mine in the fog and a smokestack that still stands above the tide. That is not a small story. It is, if anything, the central American story — and it unfolded, in significant part, right here on this coast.

The beaches and the seafood and the warm, wide Atlantic are still here. So is the history. Oceanfront rentals in North Myrtle Beach and oceanfront condos along the Grand Strand put you within easy reach of one of the most layered and underappreciated stretches of American historical landscape anywhere on the East Coast. The shore rewards people who look closely at what the tides uncover.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: South Carolina Maritime Museum, Georgetown, SC; American Battlefield Trust, Battery White; National Register of Historic Places, Battery White nomination (McNulty & Sutherland, SC Dept. of Archives and History); SC Encyclopedia — Murrells Inlet, Civil War; Post and Courier — “Saltworks Has Rich History in Georgetown County”; WPDE — “The Day Union Forces Invaded Horry County”; Horry County Historical Review (Fort Randall, Cushing’s Raid); Historical Marker Database — Fort Randall, USS Harvest Moon; US Naval Institute Proceedings, “Harvest Moon: Yankee Landmark in Carolina” (March 1967); U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command; Visit Myrtle Beach — “A History Buff’s Guide to Murrells Inlet”; MyrtleBeachSC.com — “The History of Murrells Inlet”; Georgetown County History; Gullah Museum of Georgetown; Georgetown County — gtcounty.org.