Pirates, Planters, and the Birth of the Grand Strand (1526–1775)

Walk the Ocean Drive beach on a clear morning and the ocean looks exactly the way it always has — wide, unhurried, indifferent to whoever happens to be standing at its edge. The horizon is the same horizon the Waccamaw people watched for thousands of years. It is the same horizon that startled a Spanish lookout on August 9, 1526, when six ships carrying six hundred would-be colonists entered Winyah Bay and dropped anchor in the shallow water near present-day Georgetown. It is the same horizon that pirates scanned in the early 1700s from the hidden coves of Little River and Murrells Inlet, watching for the slow, heavy silhouettes of merchant vessels weighed down with cargo.

This is Article 1 of the Thomas Beach Vacations America 250 series — nine articles marking the 250th anniversary of American independence by telling the Grand Strand’s own role in the story of this nation. That role begins long before 1776. It begins with a people who named the river. It moves through pirate gold and indigo fortunes and rice empires built on enslaved labor. It runs along a 1,300-mile road ordered by an English king that still carries traffic through North Myrtle Beach today. By the time the first shots of the Revolution echoed south from Lexington in 1775, the Grand Strand was already two and a half centuries deep in American history.

Most visitors never hear any of it. That seems like a shame worth correcting.

A Coast Older Than the Country

The sixty miles of coastline we call the Grand Strand stretch from Little River in the north — right on the North Carolina line — down through Cherry Grove, Crescent Beach, Windy Hill, Myrtle Beach, Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island, and all the way south to Georgetown, where five rivers pour into Winyah Bay. It is one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of sandy beach on the entire Atlantic seaboard, shaped by the same longshore drift and tidal rhythms it has known since long before anyone thought to put a name to it.

The modern place names — Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Murrells Inlet, Conway — are recent inventions in geological and human terms. The geography itself is ancient. And the human history layered into that geography goes back far further than most visitors imagine, through colonial settlement and piracy and rice empires and revolution, all the way to the Indigenous people who were here first and whose name still runs through the landscape like a waterway.

The Waccamaw: The First People of the Strand

Before any European ship appeared on the horizon, the Waccamaw people lived along the dark-water river that still carries their name. Part of the broader family of Siouan-speaking peoples of the Carolinas, the Waccamaw fished the tidal creeks and marshes, harvested the coastal resources of the strand, and built a culture adapted to the particular rhythms of this geography — the flooding rivers, the shifting sandbars, the rich estuaries that made Murrells Inlet and Winyah Bay among the most productive fishing grounds on the Atlantic coast.

Their presence is embedded in the landscape in ways most people drive past without registering. The Waccamaw River. Lake Waccamaw. The Waccamaw Neck — the peninsula of land between the river and the ocean that holds Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island, and much of the southern Grand Strand. Georgetown County’s earliest colonial records document multiple Indigenous tribes in this region, among them the Sampit, Santee, Winyah, and Pee Dee, whose names grace the rivers and bays of the area to this day. The Waccamaw Indian People maintain tribal ties in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe is a state-recognized nation in North Carolina. They did not disappear. They endured.

European contact, when it came, was devastating. Disease arrived before sustained settlement did, thinning populations that had no resistance to Old World illnesses. By the time English planters began arriving in earnest in the early 1700s, the Indigenous communities of the coastal Carolinas had been catastrophically reduced from their pre-contact numbers. What survived, in part, were the names — pressed into the rivers and the land like a signature that no subsequent owner thought to remove.

Spain Arrives: The 1526 Landing at Winyah Bay

On August 9, 1526 — ninety years before the Mayflower, eighty-one years before Jamestown — six Spanish ships carrying roughly six hundred settlers entered Winyah Bay near present-day Georgetown. The expedition was led by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a wealthy Spanish judge and magistrate from Hispaniola who had secured a contract from King Charles V to establish a colony on the coast of what the Spanish called La Florida del Norte. He had spent his personal fortune outfitting the fleet. He would not survive to see it fail.

The landing at Winyah Bay was not auspicious. Their largest ship struck a sandbar and sank — the supplies aboard were lost, though no lives were. Their Native American guides, who had been brought from the Caribbean as interpreters, slipped into the forest and vanished within the first few days. Scouting parties rode out to assess the land around what is now Georgetown and Pawleys Island and reported the soil poor, the population sparse. Ayllón decided to move the expedition south — some two hundred miles, according to the historical record — to a more promising river mouth that scholars now believe was Sapelo Sound in present-day Georgia. There, on September 29, 1526, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, the settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape was formally established. It was the first European colonial settlement in what would become the continental United States — preceding even St. Augustine by nearly forty years.

The colony lasted ten weeks. Disease swept through the settlers. The food ran out. Ayllón himself died on October 18, 1526. A revolt among the enslaved Africans he had brought — the first documented slave rebellion in North American history — shattered whatever remained of colonial order. By mid-November, the survivors had abandoned San Miguel and were sailing back to Hispaniola. Of the six hundred who had left, roughly one hundred and fifty made it home. The Grand Strand had claimed its first European visitors and sent them back to the sea.

The Winyah Bay landing faded from European memory quickly. But the maps drawn after 1526 labeled this stretch of coastline “tierra de Ayllón” — Ayllón’s land — and those maps circulated through the courts and counting houses of Spain, France, and England, keeping the Carolina coast in the European imagination for the century of exploration that followed. The Grand Strand was on the map before any permanent settlement existed anywhere in North America.

The Golden Age of Piracy: Blackbeard, Bonnet, and Drunken Jack

By the early 1700s, the shallow coves and hidden waterways of the northern Grand Strand had become something of an open secret among the most dangerous men on the Atlantic. The Golden Age of Piracy — roughly 1650 to 1720 — filled the sea lanes between the Caribbean and the Carolinas with vessels flying no flag or flying a black one, and the geography of the Grand Strand suited pirates the way it suited no one else. The barrier islands created labyrinthine passages too shallow for naval warships. The inlets of Little River and Murrells Inlet offered protected anchorages where a ship’s hull could be careened and scraped clean of barnacles without detection. Georgetown’s growing wealth, funneling steadily out of Winyah Bay in slow merchant vessels loaded with indigo and rice and naval stores, was an irresistible target.

The most storied pirate in the history of the Carolinas was Edward Teach — known to history as Blackbeard, named for the dense, coal-black beard he plaited with slow-burning fuses of rope and lit during battle so that smoke wreathed his face. Blackbeard operated extensively along the Carolina coast in 1717 and 1718. In early June of 1718, commanding a powerful pirate squadron, he effectively closed the port of Charleston for a week by blockading its harbor — seizing ships, taking hostages from the city’s most prominent families, and demanding medical supplies before he released them. The audacity of the act shocked the colonial governments of the Carolinas and triggered the crackdown that would end the Golden Age of Piracy on this coast within months.

Alongside Blackbeard, for a time, sailed one of the most improbable figures in pirate history: Stede Bonnet, a wealthy Barbadian sugar planter and militia major who in the spring of 1717 — apparently without warning and for reasons his contemporaries found baffling — purchased a ship, hired a crew, and became a pirate. Bonnet had money, education, and social standing. He had no sailing experience whatsoever. Blackbeard, recognizing a useful and easily manipulated ally, took over command of Bonnet’s ship for much of their partnership, relegating the “Gentleman Pirate” to passenger status aboard his own vessel. Together they blockaded Charleston. Together they preyed on Atlantic shipping from Virginia to the Caribbean. Bonnet eventually reclaimed his ship, renamed it the Royal James, and continued raiding on his own — taking more than a dozen prizes in the summer of 1718 before retreating to the Cape Fear River for repairs. It was there that South Carolina’s Colonel William Rhett found him, fought a six-hour naval battle in September 1718, and dragged him in chains to Charleston, where he was hanged on December 10, 1718. The trial transcripts survive. The execution ended, by most accounts, the Golden Age of Piracy on the Carolina coast.

But it is the legend rather than the trial transcript that has lasted longest in the Grand Strand’s memory. Out on a small island in the waterway off Murrells Inlet — visible from the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk, where seafood restaurants string their lights over the marsh — sits what locals have always called Drunken Jack Island. The legend, documented in multiple versions across two centuries of Lowcountry storytelling, says that Blackbeard and his crew anchored in Murrells Inlet one night with a haul of Caribbean rum, feasted on oysters and crab on the island, and in the morning — whether by accident or by decision — sailed away without one of their number. A pirate named Jack. He was left on the island with the rum. When the crew eventually returned, they found Jack’s bones amid the empty casks, smiling, it was said, in the direction of the sea. The island took his name. The restaurant on the MarshWalk took it too — Drunken Jack’s has been a Murrells Inlet institution since 1979, and the legend is told to every table.

Legend or not — and the Drunken Jack story, like most good coastal tales, has been lovingly embellished over generations — the pirate era on the Grand Strand was entirely real. Georgetown County’s own historical records note that at the height of the piracy crisis, more than two thousand pirates were estimated to be operating up and down this stretch of coastline. The slow, heavily laden rice barges and merchant sloops moving in and out of Winyah Bay were easy targets, and the colonial government in Charleston was too distant and too thinly resourced to police waters it could barely chart.

Georgetown Is Born: The Third Oldest City in South Carolina

In 1729, the same year that English planters were laying out a formal grid of streets at the confluence of five rivers — the Black, the Great Pee Dee, the Small Pee Dee, the Waccamaw, and the Sampit — Georgetown was established as a town. Elisha Screven drew up the original four-by-eight block plan that still forms the core of Georgetown’s historic district today, with its original street names and lot numbers intact on the National Register of Historic Places. By 1732 the Crown had designated Georgetown an official port of entry, freeing its merchants and planters from the requirement of routing all foreign trade through Charleston. It was the moment Georgetown’s trajectory as a commercial powerhouse was confirmed.

Georgetown was the third city established in South Carolina, after Charleston and Beaufort. Walking its historic district today — along Front Street above the Sampit River waterfront, past the Kaminski House Museum built around 1760, past the Prince George Winyah Episcopal Church consecrated in 1747 with its original colonial-era brickwork — is to walk through one of the most intact colonial streetscapes in the American South. Most visitors to the Grand Strand drive past Georgetown on U.S. 17 without stopping. That is one of the great undersold detours in American travel. The Rice Museum on Front Street, the maritime museum, the Gullah Museum — the history is all there, laid out and waiting.

Indigo: The Blue Dye That Built the First Fortunes

The first great cash crop of the Grand Strand was not rice. It was indigo — the plant whose fermented leaves produced a deep, saturated blue dye that English textile manufacturers in the mid-1700s could not get enough of. The British Parliament, wanting to reduce dependence on French and Spanish indigo suppliers, offered a direct bounty to colonial planters for every pound of indigo they produced. Georgetown’s planters seized the opportunity with both hands. Between roughly 1745 and 1775, indigo production transformed the Georgetown district from a promising colonial outpost into one of the wealthiest communities in British North America.

The indigo wealth built the plantation houses, funded the Winyah Indigo Society — organized in the early 1740s and incorporated in 1757 and still technically in existence today as one of the oldest social organizations in America — and paid for the first public school for white children between Charleston and Wilmington. The Society had established a free school for the poor by the early 1750s — the school received its royal charter in 1757. It also, critically, created the financial independence that would make Georgetown’s planter class willing to risk everything in a revolution against the British Crown that had made them rich. When the Revolution came and Britain’s market closed, the indigo bounty evaporated overnight. Georgetown’s planters had already begun making the pivot to their second great crop — the one that would make them the wealthiest community in all thirteen colonies.

Carolina Gold: The Rice That Made Georgetown the Wealthiest County in the Colonies

The variety was called Carolina Gold, and its name was apt — it had the color of ripe wheat at harvest and the economic value of something rarer. Rice had been introduced to the South Carolina Lowcountry from Madagascar around 1680, but it was in the river-bottom lowlands of Georgetown County — with their system of tidal rivers that could be coaxed into flooding and draining fields on a controlled schedule — that rice cultivation reached its full and extraordinary potential. By 1840, Georgetown District produced nearly half of the total rice crop of the United States and was the largest rice-exporting port in the world. The per capita income of Georgetown County’s planter class was the highest in all thirteen original colonies — a fact that has no equivalent anywhere in antebellum America.

It is impossible to tell this story honestly without acknowledging who built it. The engineering that made Georgetown’s rice economy possible — the miles of earthen dikes, the precisely calibrated floodgates called trunks, the canal systems that moved river water in and out of fields on tidal schedules — was designed and executed by enslaved Africans, many of them brought specifically from rice-growing regions of West Africa precisely because they already possessed the agricultural and hydraulic knowledge their enslavers lacked. The enslaved population of Georgetown County reached approximately 85 percent of the total population at the height of the rice era. The plantation houses still standing along the rivers — Hopsewee, Brookgreen, Arcadia, Friendfield — were built by enslaved craftsmen, maintained by enslaved labor, and made possible by an economic system that treated human beings as capital. The beauty of the Lowcountry landscape, today, is inseparable from the history of what was required to create it. The Rice Museum on Georgetown’s Front Street tells this story with care and clarity. It is worth an afternoon.

The Gullah Geechee culture that emerged from this history — a rich and distinctive fusion of West African and American Lowcountry traditions in language, cuisine, crafts, and spiritual practice — is one of the most significant cultural contributions in American history. It survives in Georgetown County and across the coastal Carolinas and Georgia, recognized today with a national heritage corridor. The Gullah Museum in Georgetown is one of the best places to encounter that living heritage.

The King’s Highway: The Road That Ran Through It All

Through all of it — the piracy, the indigo boom, the rice empire, the gathering political crisis — one road ran the length of the colonial Atlantic seaboard and passed directly through the Grand Strand. The King’s Highway began as a Native American coastal footpath, was ordered formalized by King Charles II of England around 1660, and took the better part of a century to complete into something resembling a continuous road from Boston to Charleston. By 1735 it was the primary postal route, military corridor, and commercial artery connecting all thirteen colonies. It was the road that colonial news traveled — and the news that mattered most, the news of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, reached South Carolina by riding this road south to the Boundary House at Little River, the first stop on South Carolina soil. The shot heard round the world arrived on the Grand Strand before it arrived almost anywhere else in the Deep South.

That road is still here. In Horry and Georgetown counties it survives as U.S. Highway 17. In stretches of Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, local roads still carry the name Kings Highway on the signs. The Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens in Little River, open daily to the public at 2250 SC-179, preserve a section of the original roadbed — a walking trail through old-growth forest where the packed earth beneath your feet is the same earth horses and riders and postal couriers traveled for a century and a half before the American Revolution. It is one of the most historically significant and least-visited parks on the Grand Strand. Article 2 of this series follows the King’s Highway in depth, tracing the road from its colonial origins to the April morning in 1791 when President George Washington rode it through what is now Windy Hill and gave the neighborhood its name.

On the Eve of Revolution: A Colony Ready to Break

By 1775, Georgetown County was wealthy, educated, politically sophisticated, and deeply irritated with the British Crown. The indigo bounty had been a gift, but the taxes, the trade restrictions, and the steady imposition of parliamentary authority on colonial commerce had worn the patience of Georgetown’s planter class thin. They had money, they had connections, they had the intellectual formation that comes from sending their sons to Cambridge and Edinburgh and the Inns of Court in London. They had, in short, everything needed to join a revolution — and a particular family, the Lynches of Hopsewee Plantation, who would do exactly that.

Thomas Lynch Sr. had already been a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, one of the first organized acts of colonial resistance to British taxation. His son Thomas Lynch Jr. — born at Hopsewee Plantation in 1749, educated at Eton and Cambridge, and back in South Carolina practicing law — was being groomed for the same political path. When the Continental Congress convened and South Carolina needed delegates who combined intellectual credibility with colonial legitimacy, the Lynches answered the call. What happened next — Thomas Lynch Jr.’s signature on the Declaration of Independence and the tragedy that followed — is the subject of Article 4 in this series. For now it is enough to say that the colony the Grand Strand produced was ready for what 1776 would demand of it. The years from 1526 to 1775 had built something here: a community with deep roots, fierce pride, considerable wealth, and the willingness to risk all of it for independence.

Where to Explore This History Today

Every layer of colonial history described in this article has a physical address within easy driving distance of North Myrtle Beach oceanfront homes and oceanfront condos. The history is not behind glass in a distant museum. It is out there in the landscape, walkable and driveable on a sunny afternoon.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is Article 1 of the Thomas Beach Vacations America 250 & the Grand Strand series. Read the series introduction for the full nine-article overview. Historical facts verified against the South Carolina Encyclopedia, Georgetown County historical records, the Wikipedia entries for Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and San Miguel de Gualdape, the NCpedia entry for Stede Bonnet, the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk historical archive, and the City of Georgetown’s official historical documents. Thomas Beach Vacations is a locally owned vacation rental company serving North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

America 250 & the Grand Strand: An Epic Story Hiding in Plain Sight

There is a version of this place that most visitors know well. The one with the morning smell of sunscreen and salt air, the soft thump of waves carrying through an open balcony door before the rest of the family is awake. The pelicans working the surf line. The way late afternoon light turns the water somewhere between green and gold just south of Cherry Grove. That Grand Strand is real, and it is one of the great pleasures of the American South. But there is another version of this place — older, stranger, and far more consequential — that stretches back five centuries and touches almost every major chapter of American history. Most visitors never hear a word of it.

In the summer of 2026, the United States turns 250 years old. Across the country, communities are asking what it means to be part of that story. The Grand Strand — this 60-mile arc of coastline from Little River down through Murrells Inlet, encompassing North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach, Conway, and Georgetown — does not have to look far for its answer. A signer of the Declaration of Independence was born here. The first Black man ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives grew up here. George Washington rode a horse through what is now North Myrtle Beach and recorded every detail in his diary. Franklin Roosevelt spent four weeks nearby, quietly finalizing the invasion plans for Normandy. The road that carried the news of the first shots of the Revolution south to the colonies still runs through this town — you have almost certainly driven it.

This article is the introduction to a nine-part series. Each piece goes deep on one chapter of Grand Strand history — the pirates, the planters, the soldiers, the legislators, the presidents, and the ordinary people who shaped a republic on this particular stretch of coastline. Together, they tell a story that deserves to be told, in the year it deserves most to be heard.

The Grand Strand and America — A Connection Most Visitors Never Know

Ask most people what they associate with the Grand Strand and they will give you the honest tourist’s answer: golf, seafood, the beach, the Boardwalk, outlet shopping, maybe the Shag if they know their South Carolina. Very few people — even people who have been coming here for decades — know that more Revolutionary War battles were fought on South Carolina soil than in any other colony. Fewer still know that one of those battles happened within Horry County, or that the county itself is named for a colonel who rode alongside the most celebrated guerrilla commander in American history.

That is not a criticism. History has a way of going quiet in places that later become famous for something else. The Grand Strand became famous for its beaches and its hospitality, and that reputation crowded out the earlier story. But the earlier story is there, embedded in the place names, the county boundaries, the roads, and the land itself. Conway’s name comes from Robert Conway, a Revolutionary War militiaman who farmed and fought in the swamps of Horry County. Windy Hill — one of the four communities that merged to form North Myrtle Beach in 1968 — got its name from a future president of the United States who could not keep his hat on while riding the exposed beach strand in 1791. These are not myths or local legends. They are documented historical facts.

America’s 250th anniversary is the right moment to surface them. The national commemoration — officially called the Semiquincentennial, organized through the America250 Foundation and the state-level SC250 commission — is generating an extraordinary amount of public interest in founding-era history. Ken Burns spent nine years making a six-part documentary on the American Revolution that premiered on PBS in November 2025, broke every PBS streaming record in the network’s history, and is now streaming free through July 12, 2026. People are paying attention to this history in a way that happens once a generation. The Grand Strand has a genuine, verified, remarkable story to contribute to that conversation.

Before the Colonies: The Waccamaw People and Spanish Arrival

Long before any European gave this coastline a name, the Waccamaw people lived along the river that still carries their name, fished the creeks and bays, and understood the rhythms of this particular stretch of coast in ways that took settlers centuries to approximate. The Waccamaw were part of the broader Siouan-speaking peoples of the Carolinas and had occupied this territory for thousands of years by the time Spanish explorers arrived at Winyah Bay in 1526 — making that landfall at present-day Georgetown the first documented European contact with what would become the United States.

The Spanish settlement that followed — called San Miguel de Guadalupe — lasted less than a year before disease, starvation, and conflict forced its abandonment. The expedition sailed away. The coast returned to quiet. But that brief landing at Winyah Bay gave this stretch of South Carolina a historical claim that predates the Plymouth Colony by nearly a century. The full story of the Grand Strand’s colonial origins — the pirates who used Little River and Murrells Inlet as hiding places, the Carolina Gold rice empire that made Georgetown County the wealthiest in all thirteen colonies, and the road that would eventually connect a nation — is told in depth in the first article of this series.

Pirates, Planters, and the Road That Connected a Nation

In the early 1700s, the coves and inlets of the northern Grand Strand were not vacation destinations. They were hiding places. The shallow, labyrinthine waterways around Little River and Murrells Inlet were ideal for vessels that needed to disappear quickly, and the most notorious pirates of the Golden Age — Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, and others whose names appear in the colonial court records of the era — used this coastline as a staging ground for raids on Atlantic shipping lanes. Georgetown, founded in 1729 and now the third oldest city in South Carolina, became the commercial center of a rice economy so productive that by the mid-1700s, Georgetown County was generating more wealth per capita than any county in any of the thirteen colonies.

Running through all of it — literally — was the King’s Highway. Ordered by King Charles II of England around 1660 and completed by 1735, this 1,300-mile road connected Boston to Charleston and served as the postal route, the military corridor, and the primary artery of colonial commerce along the Atlantic seaboard. In Horry and Georgetown counties, the King’s Highway is what we now know as U.S. Highway 17 — and in parts of Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, it still carries the name Kings Highway on local road signs. The history of that road, and of the president who rode it through Windy Hill, is told in its own dedicated article in this series.

The Revolution: The Swamp Fox Retreats to Little River

When the British captured Charleston in May 1780 — the largest surrender of American forces during the entire Revolutionary War — the Continental Army’s formal military presence in South Carolina effectively collapsed. What did not collapse was the resistance organized in the swamps and pine forests of the backcountry, and some of that resistance had its roots right here. General Francis Marion, who would earn the name “the Swamp Fox” for his elusive guerrilla tactics, retreated to his brother Isaac’s farm near Little River after the fall of Charleston. It was from this coastline that he began organizing the irregular warfare that would eventually help turn the tide of the Southern Campaign.

Marion’s troops encamped at Kingston — the settlement that would become Conway — during their movements through Horry County. The Battle of Bear Bluff, a documented skirmish on the Waccamaw River, involved local militia fighters whose family names still appear in Horry County today. And Colonel Peter Horry, for whom the county is named, served as one of Marion’s most capable commanders throughout the Southern Campaign. The Horry County Museum in Conway, which is free to visit and houses a significant new 2026 exhibition on the county’s Revolutionary War history, is the best place to see this story laid out with artifacts and primary sources. The full account of Marion, Horry, and the Revolution on Grand Strand ground is the subject of Article 3 in this series.

The Founding Father Born Down the Road

Thirty-five miles south of Crescent Beach, on a bluff above the North Santee River, stands Hopsewee Plantation — a Georgian-style house built around 1740 and listed today on the National Register of Historic Places. It is open to visitors Tuesday through Saturday. Thomas Lynch Jr. was born there in 1749, educated at Eton College and Cambridge University in England, and returned to South Carolina to take his place in the political leadership of a colony on the verge of revolution. In 1776, at the age of 26 and already suffering from the illness that would kill him three years later, he signed his name to the Declaration of Independence.

Lynch and his father Thomas Lynch Sr. were the only father-and-son pair to serve simultaneously in the Continental Congress, making their family’s contribution to the founding of the Republic unique among all the founding generation. Thomas Jr. died at sea in 1779, lost with his wife on a voyage from Charleston to the West Indies — never knowing how the Revolution would end, never seeing the Constitution he helped make possible. His autograph is today among the rarest of any of the 56 signers. And the house where his story began is a forty-minute drive from the nearest North Myrtle Beach vacation rental. Article 4 of this series tells his story in full.

George Washington Rides Through Windy Hill

In the spring of 1791, two years into his first term as the nation’s first president, George Washington set out from Philadelphia on a Southern Tour — a 1,900-mile journey through the former colonies intended to unify a fragile young republic and reassure citizens from Virginia to Georgia that their new government was real, present, and on their side. Washington traveled south along the King’s Highway, keeping the meticulous diary he maintained throughout his public life. On April 27th, he crossed the North Carolina–South Carolina border just north of Little River, dined with a local Revolutionary War veteran, and spent the night at the indigo plantation of Jeremiah Vereen. He wrote that Vereen had entertained him very kindly without accepting any payment.

The next morning, Vereen guided Washington across the swash and onto the beach strand — the same exposed oceanfront that visitors walk today between Ocean Drive and Windy Hill. The wind coming off the Atlantic was fierce. Washington’s hat blew off so many times during the ride south that the stretch of beach where it happened began to be called Windy Hill by locals — and Windy Hill is one of the four communities that merged in 1968 to form the city of North Myrtle Beach. The name on the road signs, the name on the real estate listings, the name in the vacation rental searches: all of it traces back to one gusty April morning when the first president of the United States could not keep his hat on his head. Article 2 of this series follows that ride in detail, using Washington’s own diary entries as the guide.

Civil War: Blockade Runners and a Live Cannonball

The same geographic features that made Little River and Murrells Inlet useful to pirates in the 1700s made them strategically significant during the Civil War. Confederate blockade runners used the shallow inlets of the northern Grand Strand to slip past Union naval patrols on routes to Nassau, Bermuda, and Havana, trading cotton for weapons, medicine, and goods the Confederacy could not manufacture. Admiral Dahlgren launched a six-warship assault on the Murrells Inlet position in December 1864 that was repulsed. In March 1865, the USS Harvest Moon — the Union flagship on the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron — was sunk by a Confederate torpedo in Winyah Bay near Georgetown. Georgetown itself was occupied by Union forces in February 1865, one of the last Southern port cities to fall.

And then there is the cannonball. During construction work in downtown Conway, workers excavating near City Hall found a Civil War-era cannonball buried in the root system of a live oak tree. It was still live — still capable of detonating — and military ordnance specialists had to be called in to dispose of it safely. History has a way of surfacing itself in this part of South Carolina, sometimes literally. Article 5 of this series tells the full Civil War story of the Grand Strand.

Reconstruction: Georgetown’s Son Who Made History in Congress

Joseph Hayne Rainey was born in Georgetown in 1832, the son of a man who purchased his own family’s freedom through his work as a barber. During the Civil War, Joseph was conscripted by Confederate forces to work on military fortifications; rather than submit, he and his wife escaped to Bermuda, where he worked as a barber and waited for the war to end. He returned to Georgetown in 1866 and within four years had accomplished something no American had accomplished before: in November 1870, he became the first Black man elected to the United States House of Representatives.

Rainey served five terms — the longest tenure of any Black congressman during the Reconstruction era — and used that platform to champion the 14th Amendment, to argue for federal enforcement of civil rights law, and to push for the establishment of public schools for all children regardless of race. A room in the United States Capitol, designated H-150, is named in his honor. A post office on Georgetown’s Front Street carries his name. A park on the Georgetown waterfront is named for him. He walked the same streets that visitors walk today on a Georgetown day trip — and his story is one of the most consequential stories in the constitutional history of the Republic. Article 6 of this series is dedicated entirely to him.

World War II: FDR Planned D-Day Thirty Miles from Here

Thirty miles south of Myrtle Beach, on 16,000 acres assembled from fourteen former rice plantations along the coast near Georgetown, Bernard Baruch — born in Camden, South Carolina, and one of the most influential financial and political figures of the twentieth century — built an estate he called Hobcaw Barony. Baruch served as economic adviser to Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman, among others. His property became a place of extraordinary historical significance. Winston Churchill came to Hobcaw in 1932 to recuperate after being struck by a car in New York City. In the spring of 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt spent four consecutive weeks at Hobcaw — the longest vacation of his four-term presidency — and it was during those weeks that the Allied plans for the D-Day invasion of Normandy were finalized.

Meanwhile, Baruch’s daughter Belle — a noted equestrian, conservationist, and landowner in her own right — was patrolling the South Carolina coastline from her beach cottage, watching for German U-boats that were operating with alarming frequency in the waters off the Grand Strand. The Hobcaw Barony Discovery Center is open to visitors today, roughly thirty miles south of North Myrtle Beach oceanfront homes and oceanfront condos. Article 7 of this series tells the full Hobcaw story.

Celebrating America 250 on the Grand Strand in 2026

The national America250 Foundation — chartered by Congress to lead the Semiquincentennial commemoration — has organized the largest synchronized Fourth of July celebration in United States history for July 3–4, 2026, with simultaneous events in cities across the country. South Carolina, through the SC250 commission chartered by the state General Assembly in 2018, has organized a year-long calendar of events spanning all 46 counties. Charleston — named by Congress as one of only four national “signature cities” alongside Boston, Philadelphia, and New York — is hosting a packed calendar of events including symposia, living history demonstrations, concerts, and waterfront celebrations throughout June and July.

For visitors staying in North Myrtle Beach, the Grand Strand’s own calendar in the summer of 2026 offers a rich mix of celebration and history. The Horry County Museum in Conway — free admission, located in a beautifully converted historic building on Main Street — has launched a dedicated 2026 exhibition on Horry County’s role in the Revolution. Ken Burns’s six-part documentary series “The American Revolution” — which premiered on PBS in November 2025 and shattered the network’s streaming records — is available free on all PBS platforms from Memorial Day through July 12, 2026, making it the perfect companion viewing for any trip that includes a visit to the historic sites described in this series. And North Myrtle Beach’s own 4th of July celebrations, as always, rank among the most spectacular on the East Coast — fireworks over the ocean, live music, and a shoreline that has witnessed American history for five centuries.

Historic Sites Worth Visiting Near North Myrtle Beach

Every article in this series connects to a real, visitable place. These are not reconstructions or theme parks — they are the actual locations where the history happened, most of them within an hour’s drive of Ocean Drive or Cherry Grove Beach.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is the hub piece of Thomas Beach Vacations’ nine-part America 250 & the Grand Strand series, published in June 2026 to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. Historical facts have been verified against primary sources including George Washington’s published diary, the Horry County Museum, the South Carolina Encyclopedia, and the records of the SC250 commission. Thomas Beach Vacations is a locally owned vacation rental company serving North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Sea Captain’s House: A Myrtle Beach Restaurant Legend More Than 60 Years in the Making

Get within two blocks of Sea Captain’s House on a warm Myrtle Beach morning and something happens before you even see the building. The salt air carries something with it — something richer, warmer, unmistakably from a kitchen that has been at this a very long time. By the time you round the corner onto North Ocean Boulevard and spot the weathered roofline tucked behind a curtain of sea oats, you already know you’re somewhere that matters.

Sea Captain’s House has been feeding Myrtle Beach since 1962 — longer than most of the hotels that crowd the shoreline today, longer than the convention center, longer than nearly every other restaurant on this 60-mile stretch of coast. Only Peaches Corner and The Bowery predate it among Myrtle Beach dining institutions. That kind of staying power is not an accident. It is the result of a particular philosophy: keep the food honest, keep the hospitality warm, and give people a reason to come back year after year until the tradition becomes a part of who they are.

For visitors exploring the Grand Strand from a base in Cherry Grove Beach or Ocean Drive, Sea Captain’s House is the kind of destination that earns a dedicated reservation — not merely a place to grab a meal, but a piece of living coastal history worth the short drive south to Myrtle Beach’s oceanfront strip. The story of how this particular cottage survived demolition, outlasted storms, and quietly became a Southern landmark is as good as anything on the menu.

A Cottage That Almost Disappeared

The building that houses Sea Captain’s House was not built to be a restaurant. In 1930, Henry Taylor of High Point, North Carolina, constructed it as a private oceanfront vacation cottage. For more than a decade the Taylor family arrived each summer to listen to the tide come in, to sit on the porch, to let the ocean do its slow, necessary work on the mind. It was exactly the kind of place that made the Grand Strand worth the trip.

In the 1940s, Charles W. Angle purchased the cottage and continued to enjoy it for what it was — a quiet, salt-worn retreat at the edge of the Atlantic. Then, in 1954, Mrs. Nellie G. Howard acquired the property and transformed it into Howard’s Manor, a nine-room guesthouse that provided three home-cooked meals daily. Mrs. Howard understood something essential: what guests on the South Carolina coast wanted most was not a transaction but a welcome. Howard’s Manor was described as a place where friends meet each year with the beach at their front door, and that framing would eventually become the philosophical DNA of everything Sea Captain’s House stood for.

That same year, 1954, Hurricane Hazel made landfall near the North and South Carolina border as a Category 4 storm. Hazel’s fierce winds and storm surge uprooted the supports of Howard’s Manor’s screened front porch, and Mrs. Howard responded by replacing the porch with a Florida Room — a sheltered yet scenic spot to enjoy the ocean’s beauty. That room still sits in the building today, a quiet monument to resilience dressed up as a dining space with a view.

By the early 1960s, the vacation tastes of coastal tourists were shifting toward larger, more modern hotel accommodations. The old guesthouse model was fading. The cottage at 3002 North Ocean Boulevard was slated for demolition — a high-rise hotel would take its place. What seemed like the end of the story turned out to be only the turn of the page.

The Brittain Family and the Birth of an Icon

In 1962, the Brittain family stepped in and gave the old cottage new purpose, opening it as Sea Captain’s House. The demolition crew never came. Instead, the kitchen got to work. What the Brittains created was something the Grand Strand had not quite seen before: a full-service oceanfront restaurant that felt personal, that carried the texture of a real place rather than a brand — somewhere the food tasted like it was made with intention, and the view through the dining room windows was not a decoration but the whole point.

Today Sea Captain’s House remains part of Brittain Resorts and Hotels, a full-service hospitality company that has been enriching Myrtle Beach since 1943. That continuity of ownership is a significant part of what has kept the restaurant’s identity intact across more than six decades of change on the Strip. The building at 3002 North Ocean Boulevard has not been flipped, rebranded, or absorbed into a chain. It is still exactly what the Brittains intended it to be: the place for seafood where friends meet year after year.

A Place Generations Return To

It is one thing for a restaurant to attract customers. It is another thing entirely for it to attract the same customers across half a century. Sea Captain’s House has managed the latter with a consistency that says something real about what gets served here — not just the food, but the feeling.

On March 13 of this year, a man named Roger celebrated his 100th birthday at Sea Captain’s House. He had been coming to the restaurant for more than 50 years. His wife Sophia, age 97, made the trip with him from Wilmington, North Carolina, for the Saturday birthday luncheon. Sophia told the staff that Sea Captain’s House is Roger’s favorite restaurant, and when a person turns 100, their preferences get honored without argument. The couple has been crossing the state line to eat here since before most of the surrounding hotels were built. That is the kind of loyalty that gets created only in places where something genuine is happening.

This is not unusual at Sea Captain’s House. The dining rooms here are full of people who have a history with the place — grandparents who brought their children, who now bring their children’s children. Visitors staying in Crescent Beach or Windy Hill who make the drive to Sea Captain’s House often find that the experience becomes woven into their own Grand Strand ritual. You come once and you understand. Then you start making reservations a year in advance.

The People Who Make It Run

The long-standing relationships at Sea Captain’s House are not limited to the guests. In January of this year, the restaurant celebrated an extraordinary milestone: Beverly Marie Stowe marked 45 years of continuous service at Sea Captain’s House. She joined the staff in the late 1970s, when the restaurant was still a young institution finding its place on the Myrtle Beach dining map, and she has been part of the fabric of this place ever since. The restaurant’s leadership cited her dedication, integrity, and loyalty as forces that have helped shape the very foundation of the Sea Captain’s House legacy.

That kind of tenure tells you something you cannot learn from a menu. It tells you that the people who work here want to be here, that something about the culture of this place is worth staying for, and that the warmth guests feel when they walk through the door is not a scripted hospitality exercise but something that has been practiced and refined for decades by people who genuinely care about the table in front of them.

What to Expect on the Menu

Sea Captain’s House is open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the kitchen takes each service seriously. Breakfast runs from 7:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and features both a buffet option and a full made-to-order menu. The signature morning item is the Crab Cakes Benedict — two fresh lump crab cakes served on fried green tomatoes, topped with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce. There are also shrimp and crabmeat omelets, thick-cut French toast, and stone-ground cheddar grits that accompany most plates. The breakfast buffet includes a fresh fruit bar and omelet station.

Lunch leans into the coastal pantry with options that are neither fussy nor forgettable. The She Crab Soup is the soup of record here — rich, cream-based, and the sort of thing that makes first-time visitors understand why regulars come back. The lunch menu also features a Sea Captain’s Specialty plate combining flounder, shrimp, and a jumbo scallop, served broiled or fried. The bang-bang shrimp tacos, seared grouper Reuben on rye, and homemade shrimp salad wrap round out a roster of midday options that do not require a special occasion to justify.

Dinner is where Sea Captain’s House earns its standing most fully. The restaurant leans on low-country tradition and the freshness of coastal sourcing. The kitchen works with local farmers and local fishermen as a matter of principle, not marketing. Sesame-crusted bluefin tuna over sushi rice with a sweet soy drizzle and wasabi represents the more contemporary edge of the menu, while shrimp and grits — shrimp, onions, celery, and bacon sauteed in cream sauce, served with a fried cheese grits cake — anchors the deep-South soul of the place. The Lowcountry Jambalaya arrives loaded with jumbo shrimp, andouille sausage, and okra in a spicy tomato sauce over white rice, and the Charleston-style crab cakes hold their own against any version served anywhere on the Grand Strand. During the warmer months, live music plays seasonally on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings on the oceanfront lawn, weather permitting.

The panko fried green tomatoes with smoked gouda pimento cheese sauce have become a fixture on the appetizer menu and reflect the restaurant’s ability to give a Southern staple a sharper, more refined edge without losing its regional identity. And then there is the hummingbird cake — when it appears on the dessert menu, order it. It does not wait for you.

Awards and Recognition

The accolades that have followed Sea Captain’s House over the decades are not the kind collected from paid directories or promotional placements. They are the kind that come from sustained, verifiable guest satisfaction and from editors who have eaten here and come away convinced.

Sea Captain’s House has been named among the South’s most legendary restaurants as part of Southern Living magazine’s South’s Best 2026 awards. Southern Living’s 2026 South’s Best Awards represent the tenth annual installment of the program, with the magazine celebrating its 60th anniversary year and once again turning to trusted readers to identify the South’s finest dining and travel experiences. Being recognized as one of the South’s legendary restaurants in that context is not a minor distinction.

Sea Captain’s House consistently earns the Tripadvisor Travelers’ Choice Award, including for 2024 and 2025, placing it in the top 10% of restaurants worldwide based on consistent, positive guest feedback. The restaurant has also earned recognition for Best Seafood, Best Outdoor Dining, and placement on a Top 10 US Restaurants with Scenic Views list — a category where the oceanfront Florida Room and the open-air lawn dining area make the case without any persuasion necessary.

Planning Your Visit

Sea Captain’s House sits at 3002 North Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach, directly on the oceanfront. The restaurant is open Monday through Sunday for breakfast from 7:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., with lunch and dinner service running from 11:30 a.m. through the evening. Reservations are accepted and are strongly encouraged during the peak summer season and on weekends year-round. The restaurant takes reservations through the early afternoon but holds availability for walk-in diners as well — calling ahead before you arrive is always the smart move.

The dining room layout offers multiple seating experiences, from the original interior rooms with their warm wooden character to the Florida Room with wraparound ocean views and the outdoor lawn area that becomes a destination in its own right on clear evenings when the live music is going. If you have a preference, mention it when you call. The best seats at Sea Captain’s House fill up early.

For guests staying in oceanfront homes or oceanfront condos in North Myrtle Beach, the drive south to Sea Captain’s House is an easy twenty minutes along the Grand Strand — the kind of outing that turns into a recurring highlight of a beach vacation rather than a one-time detour. Come for the She Crab Soup. Come for the crab cakes. Come because you want to sit in front of the same ocean that Henry Taylor’s family once sat in front of and feel, for a meal at least, that the coast is still exactly what it has always been.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Myrtle Beach Became a Household Name 50 Years Ago — and Why It Still Is

There is a particular kind of place that earns a permanent spot in the American imagination — not through a single moment or a marketing campaign, but through decades of delivering exactly what it promises. Myrtle Beach is one of those places. Drive down Ocean Boulevard on a summer evening, watch the SkyWheel turning slowly against a deepening sky, and listen to the Atlantic rolling in behind the restaurants and the laughter and the smell of sunscreen on warm pavement, and you will understand something immediately: this is a place that people return to. Not because it is the most glamorous destination on the East Coast. Because it feels like something. It feels like vacation, in the most elemental and uncomplicated sense of the word.

That feeling did not happen by accident, and it did not happen overnight. The story of how Myrtle Beach went from a quiet Carolina town to one of the most visited destinations in the United States is a story worth knowing — especially if you are among the more than 20 million people who make the trip down U.S. 17 each year to see what all the fuss is about.

Before the Boom: A Quiet Stretch of Carolina Coastline

For most of its early history, what would become Myrtle Beach was barely accessible at all. The beaches of Horry County sat behind a wall of geography — rivers, marshland, and poor roads that kept the coastline isolated from the rest of South Carolina well into the late 1800s. It was timber, not tourism, that finally cracked the region open. The Burroughs and Collins Company, a timber and turpentine operation that owned vast stretches of beachfront land, built a railroad to the coast in 1900 to move its product to market. The railroad brought workers to the beach — and workers brought the realization that this sand and surf had potential far beyond lumber.

The town took its name from the wax myrtle trees that grew wild along the shore. By the 1920s it had a modest hotel, a handful of beachfront cottages, and a reputation among middle-class families from the Carolinas as a reliable summer getaway. The tourist season ran roughly from Easter to Labor Day. It was modest and regional and entirely unpretentious — qualities that, as it turned out, would prove to be among its greatest long-term assets.

The postwar decades brought steady but unspectacular growth. Hurricane Hazel swept through in 1954, demolishing much of the oceanfront property along the Grand Strand, but the destruction had an unintended consequence: it cleared the way for a first wave of low-rise hotels and modern development, triggering what would become the area’s first real tourism boom. By the time Myrtle Beach officially incorporated as a city in 1957 — with a permanent population that had just crossed 5,000 — the foundations were in place for something much larger.

The 1970s: When Everything Changed

Fifty years ago, Myrtle Beach was a destination that most Americans outside the Carolinas had still never heard of. That was about to change in a hurry. The 1970s were the decade when Myrtle Beach stopped being a regional secret and became a national name. New construction during that decade alone topped $75 million, and the city’s permanent population tripled. Families from across the East Coast began loading up station wagons and pointing them south, drawn by something that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: here was a place where you could have a full, satisfying, genuinely fun vacation without spending a fortune.

Developers recognized the momentum and moved quickly. High-rise oceanfront hotels began replacing the small motels and beach cottages that had defined the earlier skyline. Amusement parks, water slides, arcades, and shopping centers appeared in rapid succession, transforming what had been a laid-back beach town into a full-scale entertainment destination. The Myrtle Beach Convention Center had opened in 1970, a signal that the city was thinking beyond the summer vacation crowd. By the end of the decade, the tourist season — once bounded by Easter and Labor Day — had stretched to something approaching year-round.

The Formula That Made It Stick

A lot of beach towns have their moment in the sun. What separated Myrtle Beach from the destinations that peaked and faded was a deceptively simple combination: accessibility, affordability, and variety. Myrtle Beach is easy to get to from most of the Eastern Seaboard. It is easy to navigate once you arrive. And it has always offered enough variety — beach, golf, live music, water parks, seafood, arcades, outlet shopping, state park hiking — that different members of the same family can have entirely different vacations without ever leaving the Grand Strand.

That last point matters more than it might initially seem. A destination that works for a couple of college students, a family with young children, a pair of retired golfers, and a group of friends celebrating a birthday — and works for all of them simultaneously — is extraordinarily rare. Myrtle Beach has managed to be that destination for five decades running, and that breadth of appeal is the single most important reason it has outlasted so many competitors.

Golf Capital of the World

No single element of Myrtle Beach’s identity has done more to extend its reach into new markets than golf. The area’s golf boom began in the 1960s, when developers recognized that the Grand Strand’s climate, terrain, and flat coastal landscape made it nearly ideal for course construction. The creation of Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday in 1967 formalized the golf package as a distinct product, and the courses kept coming. By the 1980s, Myrtle Beach had earned the nickname Golf Capital of the World — more golf courses per square mile than any other destination on earth. At the peak, the region boasted over 120 courses and once recorded more rounds played annually than anywhere else in the world.

Today, the region has around 100 courses remaining, following some consolidation over the past two decades as real estate development claimed a number of layouts. But the golf identity has never faded. Players from beginners to seasoned low-handicappers continue to make the Grand Strand a primary destination, drawn by the combination of quality, variety, price, and the ability to play year-round in the mild South Carolina climate. For a significant portion of visitors — particularly those in the retiree and active adult demographic that has made Horry County one of the fastest-growing areas in the nation — golf is the primary reason for the trip.

Staying Relevant: The Boardwalk, the SkyWheel, and Beyond

One of the harder things for any destination to do is reinvent itself without losing what made people fall in love with it in the first place. Myrtle Beach has done this more successfully than most. The beach is still the star of the show — that same Grand Strand coastline delivers the same wide, flat, warm-water experience that pulled those first station wagons down the highway fifty years ago. The fundamentals have not changed because the fundamentals did not need to change.

But the supporting cast has evolved considerably. The Myrtle Beach Boardwalk, completed in 2010, revitalized the downtown oceanfront with a 1.2-mile stretch of open-air restaurants, shops, and walkway that connected the heart of the city to the water in a way it had not been connected before. The Carolina Opry, which opened in 1986, pioneered the live entertainment theater scene that eventually gave Myrtle Beach something resembling a miniature Branson, Missouri on the South Carolina coast. And the SkyWheel, rising nearly 200 feet above the boardwalk, added a landmark that is visible from both the beach and the boulevard — a gondola ride that doubles as one of the best sunset viewing platforms on the East Coast.

Broadway at the Beach arrived in the 1990s as a 350-acre entertainment and shopping complex built around a central lake, adding a destination anchor that gave visitors a reason to spend an entire day — and evening — off the sand. Ripley’s Aquarium followed, and the complex became one of the most-visited attractions in South Carolina. Each addition has built on what came before, layering new reasons to visit on top of the original reason that never stopped working.

More Than Just a Beach Trip

Step off the sand and the Grand Strand reveals itself as something considerably deeper than its postcard version suggests. Myrtle Beach State Park, just south of the main commercial strip, offers a version of the Carolina coast that feels genuinely removed from the boardwalk crowds — maritime forest trails, a fishing pier, a campground, and the kind of quiet that reminds you how wild this coastline was before the hotels arrived. It is a twenty-minute drive from the SkyWheel and feels like a different world entirely.

For families traveling with children, the mini-golf culture alone is worth the trip. Myrtle Beach has more elaborately themed miniature golf courses per square mile than perhaps anywhere else in the country — pirate ships, dinosaurs, volcanoes, waterfalls — and the tradition runs deep enough that many adults have photographs of themselves as children playing the same courses their own kids are navigating now. That kind of generational continuity is not something a destination manufactures. It is something earned, slowly, over fifty years of doing things right.

The live entertainment scene — dinner theaters, concert venues, variety shows — continues to bring visitors who are not primarily drawn by the ocean. The restaurant landscape has matured well beyond the all-you-can-eat seafood buffets that defined the area’s dining identity for decades, though those institutions still exist and still fill up every night in season. And the shopping, anchored by Broadway at the Beach and extended by Barefoot Landing in North Myrtle Beach, gives the retail-minded traveler as much room to roam as the coast gives the beach lover.

North Myrtle Beach: The Quieter, Deeper Side of the Grand Strand

About fifteen miles up the coast from downtown Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach offers a different entry point into the Grand Strand experience — one that trades the high-rise density of the main strip for wider beaches, quieter neighborhoods, and a sense of place that feels more rooted in the area’s original character. It is a separate city with its own government and its own identity, and for many visitors it is the preferred base for exploring everything the Grand Strand has to offer.

The four communities of North Myrtle Beach each carry their own personality. Cherry Grove Beach is known for its fishing pier and unhurried pace. Ocean Drive is the birthplace of the shag — the official state dance of South Carolina — and carries the kind of boardwalk history that no amount of development can fully replicate. Crescent Beach sits in the relaxed center, and Windy Hill offers the peaceful southern end of the strip for those who want ocean views without the foot traffic. Visitors can choose from spacious oceanfront home rentals and well-positioned oceanfront condos — putting the Atlantic directly outside the door and everything the Grand Strand has built over the past fifty years just a short drive away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Fifty years of earning a reputation is not something that happens by accident — and experiencing it firsthand is easier than you might think. Thomas Beach Vacations has oceanfront homes and condos across North Myrtle Beach ready for your next Grand Strand trip. Browse the full collection at northmyrtlebeachvacations.com or call (866) 249-2100 and let the team help you find exactly the right place on the coast.