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.

From Smokestacks to Sand: Conway’s 800-Acre Waterfront Transformation Is the Biggest Story on the Grand Strand

For fifty years, you knew you were getting close to Conway when the smokestacks appeared. Two 300-foot concrete towers rising out of the lowcountry green like monuments to a different era, visible from Highway 501 for miles, as much a landmark of the drive to the beach as the South of the Border signs or the first salt-air breath at the Intracoastal. The Grainger Generating Station burned coal to light the Grand Strand from the 1960s until 2012, and when its stacks finally came down in 2016, the skyline along the Waccamaw River went quiet for the first time in half a century.

What nobody driving past that empty site could have guessed is what Conway has been quietly planning to put in its place. An inland beach. A 100-slip marina. A 3.5-mile extension of the Conway Riverwalk threading through wetlands and connecting the entire downtown waterfront into one continuous corridor. An amphitheater. A mixed-use village of shops, restaurants, a hotel and waterfront residences. Eight hundred acres of former industrial land — given to the city by Santee Cooper, cleared of more than a million tons of coal ash, certified safe by state regulators, and now officially in the hands of the people of Conway — becoming what City Administrator Adam Emrick has compared to a state park in the middle of downtown.

That is not a someday-maybe idea on a planning board. The land transfer is complete. The annexation vote passed. The $80 million financing plan is approved. Engineering is underway. A canal on the property has already reopened for public boating and fishing — the first concrete step in a transformation that Conway’s mayor has called a once-in-a-generation opportunity and that Emrick, who has shepherded the project for years, puts in even starker terms: once every several generations does a city get a chance like this.

For anyone who vacations on the Grand Strand — and especially for the families who come back year after year to the quieter sands of North Myrtle Beach — this is worth watching. Conway is already one of the best day trips on the coast, and it is about to become something no other small town in the Carolinas can match.

The Ghost of the Grainger Plant

The backstory matters because it explains why 800 acres of prime waterfront land existed in the first place, hidden in plain sight along one of the busiest highways in Horry County. The Grainger Generating Station was a Santee Cooper coal-fired power plant that sat at the intersection of U.S. 501 and the Waccamaw River, less than a mile from downtown Conway. Lake Busbee, a 330-acre man-made cooling pond, sprawled across the other side of the highway, and together the plant and its support infrastructure occupied roughly 808 acres of land that the public was not allowed to use.

The plant ran for decades, powering the Grand Strand through its transformation from a quiet beach town into one of the most visited resort coasts on the East Coast. It closed in 2012. The twin smokestacks came down in 2016, and with them went the last visible evidence that the site had ever been industrial at all. What remained was the land itself — hundreds of acres of waterfront straddling the highway, flanked by the river and the wetlands, in the middle of a county that was growing faster than almost anywhere in the Southeast. Conway’s leaders saw the opportunity immediately. It just took a decade to get the land.

The path ran through a coal ash cleanup (more on that below), a Santee Cooper board vote in December 2023, a Joint Bond Review Committee approval in March 2024, and a formal property transfer completed in April 2025. On July 23, 2025, Conway held a public ceremony to mark the acquisition, and city officials, Santee Cooper leaders and community members stood on the land together for the first time as owners. The smokestacks were gone. The coal ash was gone. And the vision — the one Emrick had been describing in council meetings and planning retreats for years — was finally, officially, possible.

What Is Coming: Inland Beach, Marina, Riverwalk and Amphitheater

The plan for the former Grainger site is ambitious in scope but disciplined in its conservation commitment. Of the roughly 808 acres, approximately 533 acres — essentially all of Lake Busbee — have been rezoned to the city’s Conservation Preservation district and will be left in their restored natural state as wetlands and wildlife habitat. The Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge is expected to help tend the lake. Only 12 to 15 acres are designated for private commercial development. Everything else becomes public space — trails, water, sand and sky.

The centerpiece is the inland beach, planned for the site of the former Coal Ash Pond No. 1 — the pond closest to the Horry County Government Annex, which has been fully cleared, remediated and certified safe for public use by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. The beach will be a freshwater recreation area designed for swimming, kayaking and paddleboarding in a controlled environment without motorized boat traffic — a distinction that will appeal to families with young children who want the water without the worry.

Adjacent to the beach, the city plans a new inland marina with approximately 100 boat slips, which would connect to the Waccamaw River and relieve the persistent waitlist problem at Conway’s existing downtown marina. An amphitheater for concerts, festivals and community events is planned near the intersection of Elm Street and Marina Drive, at the site of old tennis courts. And threading through it all: a 3.5-mile extension of the Conway Riverwalk, weaving through wetlands and restored landscapes to link the new recreation zone to the existing downtown Riverwalk along the Waccamaw. When complete, the combined walkway system will create one of the longest continuous waterfront trails in the South Carolina lowcountry.

The Mixed-Use Village

The 12 to 15 acres set aside for private development would be brought to life through public-private partnerships once the infrastructure is in place. Draft plans show a mixed-use village with shops, restaurants, a hotel and waterfront condominiums — the kind of walkable, water-facing development that has worked at Market Common in Myrtle Beach, another former military/industrial site successfully converted to community use. Mayor Barbara Blain-Bellamy has said the area could see restaurants, shops, boat docks and possibly a downtown hotel or two, all tied into the broader recreational footprint. The scale is modest by design: this is not a high-rise district. It is a village that sits inside a park.

The Cleanup That Made It Possible

No story about this property is complete without the part that people rightly ask about first: the coal ash. The Grainger plant left behind two ash ponds containing residual coal combustion waste — material that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, can contain contaminants including mercury, cadmium and arsenic. In 2013, the Southern Environmental Law Center sued Santee Cooper over pollution at the site, and the two sides reached a settlement that set the cleanup in motion.

Over the following years, Santee Cooper removed more than a million tons of coal ash from the two ponds, dug an additional foot of soil from beneath the pits, and restored the land above to wetlands. Santee Cooper CEO Jimmy Staton addressed the safety question directly at the July 2025 celebration, stating that the utility went through extensive remediation and that people should not be concerned about any lingering effects. DHEC has certified the former Ash Pond No. 1 as safe for the recreational purposes the city intends to use it for. Santee Cooper will continue to monitor groundwater at the site going forward. Lake Busbee itself still carries environmental restrictive covenants from the closure process and will be left in its restored natural state rather than opened for swimming or fishing — a decision that honors both the ecological reality and the conservation commitment at the heart of the project.

The canal that once served the plant’s industrial operations has already been restored and opened to the public for boating and fishing, a milestone that Mayor Blain-Bellamy confirmed in July 2025 and called the first step in the city’s vision for the property. As the mayor put it: what once held coal ash now holds opportunity, and what once served machines will now serve people.

How Conway Is Paying for It: The $80 Million Plan

The financial architecture behind this project is as deliberate as the land plan. Conway carries no municipal debt — a remarkable fact for a city of its size — and the initial phases of the project will be funded through hospitality fee revenue already collected by the city. For the larger build-out, the city created a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district covering the downtown and Lake Busbee area, a financing tool that allows the city to fund infrastructure improvements using the property tax revenue generated by the new development itself. Conway City Council approved the TIF ordinance in December 2025.

City officials project that the TIF district could generate as much as $170.5 million in revenue over the coming decades — far more than the $80 million price tag of the public infrastructure plan — making the project self-sustaining over time. It is the same financing model that helped transform the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base into Market Common, and Conway’s leaders have cited that precedent as proof of concept. The private-side development (hotels, restaurants, residences) would come later through public-private partnerships and would not rely on city funds.

Timeline: When Will It Be Built?

This is the question everyone asks, and the honest answer is: it is a multi-year, multi-phase project, and the city has been transparent about the timeline. City Administrator Adam Emrick has said publicly that engineering work alone will take 18 to 24 months — a period of site planning, permitting and design that began after the July 2025 land transfer. Following that, he has estimated two to three years of construction to bring the major elements online. The WMBF report from the July 2025 celebration cited a five- to six-year total window before residents and visitors see the full transformation take shape.

Importantly, Emrick has said the work will be phased so that people start seeing visible progress before the entire project is complete. The canal is already open. Trail connections, the Riverwalk extension and the inland beach are likely among the earlier phases; the mixed-use village and hotel components, which depend on private-sector partnerships, will follow once the public infrastructure is in place. WBTW reported in July 2025 that officials cited a three-year construction timeline for the inland beach and kayaking areas specifically.

What visitors to the Grand Strand should expect in the near term: the property is not yet a recreation destination in 2026, but you can already boat and fish the restored canal, and the Lake Busbee trail remains accessible to walkers and birders. The real construction activity — earthmoving, boardwalk pilings, beach grading — will become visible over the next two to three years, and if the phased timeline holds, the first major public amenities could open as early as 2028 or 2029. For a project of this scale, that is remarkably fast.

Conway’s Riverwalk Is Already Worth the Drive

Even before a single shovel hits the Grainger site, Conway is a town that rewards the visitor who makes the twenty-minute drive inland from the beach. The existing Conway Riverwalk runs along the Waccamaw River through downtown, a boardwalk of cypress planks over dark water, lined with live oaks and Spanish moss, connecting shops and restaurants to the marina and the old railroad trestle. On a weekday morning it belongs to joggers and dog walkers; on a Saturday evening it belongs to families finishing dinner at Rivertown Bistro or walking to the Theatre of the Republic for a show. The city recently completed a Riverwalk expansion connecting the riverfront to Main Street, adding floating docks, irregular-shaped viewing decks and gated access near Kingston Presbyterian Church — a roughly $2.3 million project that bridged the gap between downtown and the water.

Downtown Conway itself is a Main Street town in the best sense of the phrase: locally owned shops, a weekly farmers market, the Horry County Museum, the Conway Glass & Art Gallery, bakeries and bookshops and the kind of storefront restaurants where the owner knows your name by the second visit. The Theatre of the Republic, a community theater that has been producing plays in the old fire station on Main Street since 1968, is a genuine local institution. The Waccamaw River — blackwater, cypress-lined, rich with wildlife — is a kayaking destination in its own right, and guided paddling tours launch from the marina regularly during the warmer months.

This is the foundation onto which the Lake Busbee project is being built. The Riverwalk extension will not start from scratch; it will connect to a waterfront system that already works and already draws visitors. Adding 3.5 miles of new trail, an inland beach, a 100-slip marina and an amphitheater does not change what Conway is — it amplifies it. The town that has always been the quiet, oak-shaded heart of the Grand Strand is about to have the physical space to match that identity at a scale nobody expected.

Making the Day Trip from North Myrtle Beach

Conway is roughly 20 miles from North Myrtle Beach, a straight shot west on Highway 9 or south on Highway 17 to Highway 501. From Cherry Grove Beach or Ocean Drive, plan on 30 to 40 minutes. From Crescent Beach or Windy Hill, closer to 25 to 35 minutes. It is one of the easiest and most underrated day trips from the beach, especially on a rainy morning or a hot afternoon when a change of scenery sounds better than another hour under an umbrella.

Right now, the Riverwalk, the downtown shops, the museums and the kayaking are reason enough to go. In a few years, when the inland beach opens and the extended boardwalk threads through the wetlands and the amphitheater starts hosting summer concerts, Conway will be a full-day destination — the kind of place where families staying in an oceanfront home or oceanfront condo in North Myrtle Beach build an entire day around the river, the trails, the shops and the food, then drive back to the ocean for sunset.

Mayor Blain-Bellamy has said that Conway wants to re-establish itself not just as a destination but as the gateway to the Grand Strand — the place visitors pass through on 501 and stop because they cannot help themselves. With 800 acres of waterfront, an inland beach, a new marina and a Riverwalk that could soon rival any in the state, that gateway is about to have a very different front door.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: WBTW News13, “Conway celebrates historic transfer of Lake Busbee property into city limits,” Adam Benson (July 24, 2025); WMBF News, “‘Once-in-a-generation opportunity’: Santee Cooper transfers 800 acres to city of Conway for redevelopment” (July 23, 2025); WPDE ABC15, “Conway’s plan to transform old coal plant into vibrant waterfront” (July 24, 2025); MyHorryNews, “Conway leaders look to rezone former ash pond, Lake Busbee site,” S.T. Cardinal (July 22, 2025); The Post and Courier Myrtle Beach, “Power plant to marina? Santee Cooper looks to transfer 800-plus acres to Conway,” Charles D. Perry (December 5, 2023); WBTW News13, “Conway, Horry County school officials meet over city’s planned $80M downtown redevelopment vision” (November 18, 2025); WBTW News13, “Conway leaders advance financing plan for $80M downtown revitalization project” (December 2, 2025); Santee Cooper press release, “Santee Cooper Approves Transactions That Offer Significant Community Benefits” (December 4, 2023); City of Conway official site, Riverwalk Expansion announcement. Project details, timelines and plans verified as of July 2026 and are subject to change as engineering and permitting progress.