The land remembers things the highway forgot. Drive south on Kings Highway past the outlet malls and the pancake houses and the airport fence line, and somewhere around the 4400 block the billboards fall away and the live oaks close in overhead, and you are suddenly inside a piece of the Grand Strand that has not changed its mind in ninety years. This is Myrtle Beach State Park, and on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, it turned ninety years old — the first state park ever opened in South Carolina, still standing on the same 312 acres of maritime forest and undeveloped sand where it began in the summer of 1936.

Ninety is a peculiar age for a public place. Restaurants do not reach it. Amusement parks rarely do. Most of the motor courts and fishing camps that shared the coast with this park in 1936 exist now only in postcards and in the memories of people who were children then. But the park endured — through a world war fought next door at what became the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, through Hurricane Hazel and Hurricane Hugo, through Ian and a nor’easter and every ordinary summer in between — and on the first day of July it threw itself a birthday party with cupcakes and candles and children who had no idea they were standing on the oldest ground in the entire South Carolina state park system.

The celebration drew locals, vacationers, rangers and volunteers, and it did what the park has always done best: it slowed everybody down. There were guided history walks at nine in the morning, relay races and hula hoops before lunch, old photographs laid out across picnic tables like a family album nobody had opened in years, and at noon, ninety cupcakes handed out one at a time until they were gone. For a coastline built on speed — on lazy rivers and zip lines and all-you-can-eat crab legs — a morning spent looking at a 1938 photograph of a park entrance is its own quiet kind of thrill.

If you are vacationing anywhere along the Grand Strand this July, the anniversary is more than a news item. It is an invitation. The party lasted one day, but the celebration runs all month — and the park itself, with its pier and its sculptured oaks and its mile of beach that looks the way the whole coast once looked, is open every single day. Here is the story of how it got here, and how to see it for yourself.

A Birthday Ninety Years in the Making

The morning of July 1 began the way most good mornings at this park begin: on foot, under the trees, before the heat had fully arrived. From 9 to 10 a.m., rangers led a guided walk called A Stroll Back in Time, starting at the Fishing Pier picnic deck and winding through the natural and historical features that have shaped the park since 1936 — the dunes, the forest, the old Civilian Conservation Corps structures that still stand and still work, some of them, nearly a century after young men built them by hand for a dollar a day.

By mid-morning the celebration had moved to Shelter 1, where park staff ran water relays, hula hoop contests and obstacle courses for the kids from 10:30 to 11:15. Then came the part the older visitors had really come for: a History and Memories session, where rangers spread historic photographs across the picnic tables and simply talked — about what the park looked like in the fifties, about the storms, about the families who have camped in the same loop for three and four generations. At noon, the cupcakes appeared, chocolate and vanilla, the first ninety visitors served while supplies lasted, and children were called up to help blow out the candles. The afternoon closed with a presentation in the Activity Center classroom titled Through the Years at Myrtle Beach State Park, a walk through nine decades of photographs and milestones.

According to reporting from MyHorryNews, visitors came from well beyond Horry County for the occasion. One couple from North Carolina, Debbie and Bruce Anderson, told the paper they had driven down specifically to learn the park’s history and found themselves charmed as much by the people as the place — the crowd itself, Debbie Anderson observed, was half the entertainment. Giveaways included park maps and a commemorative sticker bearing the park logo and a special 90th anniversary design, small tokens that will be riding on cooler lids and camper bumpers up and down the East Coast by August.

Park officials framed the day plainly: the celebration was designed to honor the park’s long history while encouraging people to get out and use the place — to fish it, walk it, swim it, camp it. Ninety years on, that remains the whole idea.

The Boys in Green and Yellow: How the CCC Built South Carolina’s First State Park

During the anniversary program, interpretive ranger Ann Wilson opened her welcome with a question that stumped most of the crowd: did anyone know what the colors green and yellow stood for? The answer, she explained, was the Civilian Conservation Corps — the Depression-era work program whose colors those were, and without which there would be no Myrtle Beach State Park, no ninety candles, no cupcakes.

The story starts in 1934, when Myrtle Beach Farms donated 312 acres of oceanfront land to the state. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had created the CCC the year before, putting unemployed young men to work on conservation projects across the country, and South Carolina put its enrollees to work on the coast. They cleared trails, raised buildings of timber and brick, and shaped a raw stretch of maritime forest into a public park. When the gates opened on July 1, 1936, Myrtle Beach State Park became the first park to open in the South Carolina state park system — the original, the one against which the other forty-some parks that followed are still measured.

Sixteen Parks, One Legacy

Wilson told the crowd that the CCC’s fingerprints are all over the state. Sixteen South Carolina state parks trace their construction to the Corps, a roster that runs from the mountains to the sea: Aiken, Barnwell, Cheraw, Chester, Edisto Beach, Givhans Ferry, Hunting Island, Kings Mountain, Lake Greenwood, Lee, Oconee, Paris Mountain, Poinsett, Sesquicentennial, Table Rock — and Myrtle Beach, the one that opened first. Several of the buildings the CCC raised here in the 1930s are still in daily use, which is a sentence you cannot write about much else on the Grand Strand. Most remarkably, the park’s six rental cabins — furnished, heated, air-conditioned, tucked two hundred yards from the beach — are original CCC construction. Families sleep tonight in rooms built by hand during the Great Depression, and there is something quietly astonishing about that.

The old CCC bathhouse figures prominently in the park’s photo archive too. One image displayed at the celebration, dated 1940, shows visitors playing games on the bathhouse’s top floor — a reminder that even in its earliest years, the park was never merely scenery. It was a gathering place, built to be used hard and loved harder, and the wear of ninety summers shows in the best possible way.

Nine Decades Spread Across a Picnic Table

The most affecting exhibit at the celebration required no screen, no headset, no admission line. It was a set of historic photographs laid flat across picnic tables in the July sun, weighted against the sea breeze, free for anyone to lean over and study. And people did lean, all day long — grandparents narrating for grandchildren, strangers comparing notes, everyone playing the same game of then-and-now.

The images traced the park’s whole arc. A July 1938 photograph showed the park entrance just two years after opening, the road narrow, the trees younger and thinner than the cathedral canopy that shades the entrance drive today. The 1940 shot captured that game-playing crowd atop the CCC bathhouse. A 1959 image showed a line of campers cresting a hill — the tail end of the decade when the American family camping vacation became a national institution, and this campground became one of its southern capitals. Another photo from August 1959 recorded the vending and camping registration operation, all clipboards and window fans, a world away from today’s online reservation system. And then there was the photograph that made the older locals go quiet: Pier No. 4 under reconstruction after Hurricane Hugo, the 1989 storm that rearranged the South Carolina coast and taught a generation what the ocean can take away.

That Hugo photograph carries a lesson that runs through the park’s entire history: nothing here has survived ninety years by accident. The buildings, the pier, the forest itself — all of it has been defended, repaired and rebuilt, storm after storm, by people who decided the place was worth the trouble. Which brings us to the pier.

The Pier That Refuses to Stay Down

Every fishing pier on the Grand Strand has a biography, and the one at Myrtle Beach State Park reads like a boxer’s. The structure standing today is the fourth pier built at the park, its predecessor famously battered by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and rebuilt. Then came the modern chapter: Hurricane Ian damaged the pier in the fall of 2022, and just as repairs wrapped up and the park prepared to reopen it in December 2023, a nor’easter blew through on December 17 and knocked out two support pilings. Emergency repairs followed, and in July 2024 the pier finally reopened in full — to genuine celebration, because as park manager Troy Crider told MyHorryNews at the time, the pier is probably the single most popular feature of the entire park.

It is easy to see why. Walk to the end of it on a clear morning and look north: the sculptured oaks of the park rise straight from the sand, a green wall of maritime forest, and where the park boundary ends the high-rises begin and run unbroken toward the horizon. No other vantage point on the Grand Strand shows you so plainly what was saved and what was built. Crider, who grew up in the state park service and worked his way from a seasonal summer job to the manager’s office by way of a recreation degree at Coastal Carolina University, has said the pier matters precisely because it makes that contrast impossible to ignore — it stands guard over one of the last beachfront green spaces on the entire strand.

Fishing the Pier in 2026

The pier is a working fishing platform, and the fishing is serious. Anglers pull flounder, whiting, trout, spots, Spanish mackerel, king mackerel, drum and bluefish from these waters, and crabbing off the rails is a family tradition older than most of the families practicing it. Here is the arrangement that surprises first-timers: you do not need a South Carolina fishing license to fish from the pier itself. You pay a daily pier fishing pass instead — currently $8 for ages 16 and up, $5 for South Carolina seniors and disabled residents, $3 for children 6 to 15, and free for ages 5 and under — and rod rentals are available from the pier gift shop for $25 a day with a refundable deposit. Surf fishing from the beach is a different matter: that requires a state saltwater license and is not permitted where lifeguards are on duty. Shark fishing from the pier is prohibited outright. The pier store opens at 6:30 each morning, which is exactly when the serious anglers — and the serious sunrise-watchers — want to be there anyway.

One Mile of Beach the Way the Whole Coast Used to Be

The statistic that best explains this park is the simplest one: it protects one full mile of undeveloped beach in Horry County, a county where undeveloped oceanfront is otherwise nearly extinct. Behind that beach stands a maritime forest of live oaks and southern magnolias so significant it has been designated a South Carolina Heritage Trust Site, its dunes anchored by sea oats and shaped into one of the most expansive natural dune systems left on this stretch of coast.

Two nature trails thread through it. The Sculptured Oak Nature Trail takes its name honestly — the salt wind has carved the oaks along it into leaning, wind-swept shapes you will not forget — and the shorter Yaupon Nature Trail offers an easy walk through the same forest by a different route. Between them sits the park’s Nature Center, open Tuesday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with saltwater aquariums, live animals and interactive natural history exhibits that turn a rained-out beach day into the best afternoon of a kid’s vacation.

The beach itself works a double shift. By day it belongs to swimmers and shell hunters, with Horry County lifeguards stationed on the park’s north section from mid-May through mid-September and umbrellas and chairs available to rent right from the lifeguard stands. By night, in season, it belongs to the loggerheads. Even here, in the middle of the busiest resort coast in the Carolinas, sea turtles still haul themselves ashore to nest, and the park’s rangers manage those nests with the devotion of people guarding something irreplaceable. Ranger Ann Malys Wilson, the same interpreter who led the anniversary program, has long taught visitors the simple habits that help the turtles: fill in the holes you dig, carry out your litter, and keep beach-facing lights red and dim during nesting season. It costs a vacationer nothing and it keeps a ninety-year-old promise the park made to this coast.

And for those who cannot bear to leave at closing time, the park remains one of the most beloved places to camp on the entire East Coast seaboard: 278 campsites — 138 of them with full water, electric and sewer hookups — plus a 30-site seasonal tent area and those six original CCC cabins, all of it roughly three hundred yards from the sand, all of it under the trees.

The Historical Goose Chase Runs All July

Miss the party on July 1? The park planned for you. Throughout the entire month of July 2026, Myrtle Beach State Park is running a monthlong Historical Goose Chase — a self-guided challenge that sends participants around the park completing history-themed tasks. Finish the challenges, turn in your completed paperwork, and you can receive a commemorative 90th anniversary T-shirt, the kind of souvenir that cannot be bought at any gift shop on Ocean Boulevard because it has to be earned on foot, under the oaks, in the place itself.

For families vacationing on the Grand Strand this month, the Goose Chase is a ready-made half-day adventure: part scavenger hunt, part history lesson, part excuse to explore corners of the park — the trails, the pier, the old CCC structures — that a beach-only visit would miss. Details are posted through the park’s official channels at southcarolinaparks.com, and the rangers at the entrance station can point you in the right direction when you arrive.

Planning Your Visit: Hours, Admission and What to Know

The park sits at 4401 South Kings Highway in Myrtle Beach, just south of the former Air Force base, and in summer it operates on generous hours: 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily from March through November, closing at 8 p.m. December through February. Admission at the gate is $8 for adults, $5 for South Carolina seniors 65 and older, $4 for children 6 to 15, and free for children 5 and under — still one of the great entertainment bargains on the Grand Strand, considering it buys a full day of beach, pier, trails and Nature Center.

One honest word of warning for July visitors: this park is popular, and parking is first-come, first-served and limited. On summer weekends and holidays the park can reach capacity between roughly 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and temporarily close its gates until crowds thin. The rangers’ advice is simple and correct — arrive early or arrive late. Early is better anyway. The light is softer, the fishing is better, the sand is cooler, and you will have the Sculptured Oak Trail nearly to yourself.

Making the Day Trip from North Myrtle Beach

From North Myrtle Beach, the state park is an easy day trip — roughly fifteen miles down the coast, twenty-five to thirty-five minutes by car depending on where you start and how Kings Highway is behaving. Guests staying up in Cherry Grove Beach, at the northern tip of the city near the marsh and the fishing pier, should budget a few extra minutes; those staying along Ocean Drive, the shag-dancing heart of North Myrtle Beach, or in the quieter blocks of Crescent Beach will find the run straightforward — south on Highway 17, and keep going past the airport. From Windy Hill, the southernmost of North Myrtle Beach’s four beach sections and the closest to the park, the drive is shortest of all.

The smart play in July: leave early enough to clear the park gate before 10 a.m., spend the morning on the pier and the trails, picnic under the oaks, work the Goose Chase challenges after lunch, and be back in North Myrtle Beach in time for a late-afternoon swim on your own stretch of sand. It is the rare Grand Strand outing that costs a family less than a round of mini golf and sends everyone home with a history lesson, a sunburn worth having, and possibly a commemorative T-shirt.

And here is the pleasant irony of visiting a ninety-year-old park from a North Myrtle Beach vacation rental: you get both versions of the coast in a single day. The park shows you the shoreline as it was in 1936 — wild dunes, wind-carved oaks, a beach with nothing behind it but forest. Then you drive home to the shoreline as it became — and if home for the week is one of the oceanfront homes along the North Myrtle Beach strand, or a high-floor view from one of the area’s oceanfront condos, you will watch that evening’s sunset over the same Atlantic the CCC boys saw when they knocked off work in 1935, and you will understand exactly why they thought this coast was worth building something permanent on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: MyHorryNews, “Myrtle Beach State Park celebrates 90th anniversary” (July 2026); MyHorryNews, “‘Everybody loves the pier’: After storm damage, pier reopens at Myrtle Beach State Park” (July 2024); South Carolina State Parks official site, Myrtle Beach State Park pages (park hours, admission, camping, fishing and 90th birthday announcements, accessed July 2026); WBTW News13 coverage of the December 2023 nor’easter pier damage. Event details, prices and hours verified as of July 2026 and subject to change; confirm current information with the park at (843) 238-5325 or southcarolinaparks.com before visiting.