Tides of War: The Civil War Along the Grand Strand

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

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

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

A Coast at War: The Grand Strand in 1861

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

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

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

Salt and Survival: The War’s Most Unglamorous Weapon

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

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

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

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

Blockade Runners and Shadow Ports

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

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

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

Fort Randall: Cushing’s Midnight Raid on Little River

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

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

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

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

Murrells Inlet Under Fire

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

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

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

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

Grand Strand Civil War Chronology: Key Events Along the Coast

Battery White: Georgetown’s Last Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sinking of the USS Harvest Moon

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

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

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

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

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

What the War Left Behind

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

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

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

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

Frequently Asked Questions

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

The Road That Built America — And Still Runs Through North Myrtle Beach

You have almost certainly driven it. If you have ever turned off the interstate and headed toward the beach on U.S. 17, if you have ever sat at a traffic light on Kings Highway in Myrtle Beach watching the procession of summer afternoon traffic inch south, if you have ever navigated the strip from Ocean Drive down through Crescent Beach and Windy Hill — you have been traveling the King’s Highway. You just did not know it.

This is Article 2 of the Thomas Beach Vacations America 250 series, and it follows one of the most consequential roads in American history from its origins as a Native American coastal footpath all the way to a specific two-day stretch in April 1791, when the first president of the United States rode it through what is now North Myrtle Beach and recorded every detail in his diary. The King’s Highway carried the first postal riders between the colonies. It moved British troops and revolutionary militia. It delivered the news of the first shots fired at Lexington — the news that started the American Revolution — to a house in Little River before anyone in Charleston had heard a word of it. And then, twelve years after independence, it brought George Washington himself to this coastline, where the open beach between Little River and Pawleys Island did what it has always done to hats and expectations: it refused to cooperate.

The road is still here. So is the story.

A Road Hiding in Plain Sight

Most roads accumulate history quietly. They do not announce it. A road that has been traveled for three hundred years looks, on a Tuesday afternoon in June, exactly like any other road — asphalt and traffic signals and the occasional green sign telling you what town is ahead and how many miles. The King’s Highway is that kind of road. Its history is embedded in the pavement beneath the rental cars and delivery trucks, in the straight-line logic of a corridor that Europeans formalized from trails that Indigenous people had already been walking for centuries before them. You do not feel it. You drive it.

But knowing the history changes the drive. When you cross from North Carolina into South Carolina on U.S. 17 just north of Little River, you are crossing the same line that George Washington crossed on horseback on April 27, 1791. The intersection at Heather Lakes Drive, a half-mile or so south of the state line on the left side of U.S. 17, is where Horry County has placed a historical marker describing the Boundary House — a colonial-era public house where, in May 1775, the first dispatch reporting the Battle of Lexington arrived in South Carolina, carried by a rider on the King’s Highway. The news of the Revolution came to this spot before it reached Charleston.

Most people drive past the marker without slowing down. That seems like a loss worth correcting.

Origins: From Native Trail to the King’s Road

The King’s Highway did not spring into existence by royal decree. It grew from something much older — a network of footpaths and trade routes used by the Indigenous peoples of the Atlantic coastal plain for generations before any European arrived to name or number them. The Waccamaw, the Catawba, the Winyah, the Tuscarora, the Lenape — each nation maintained trails connecting hunting grounds, fishing sites, and trade partners along the coast. When European colonists arrived and began moving between settlements, they did what travelers have always done: they followed the paths that were already there.

By the mid-seventeenth century, English settlers from Virginia were pushing south and English settlers from Carolina were pushing north, and a continuous road connecting the two was clearly needed for commerce, communication, and defense. Around 1660, King Charles II issued the orders that set formal road construction in motion. What followed was not a single coordinated project but a patchwork of colonial governments each building their section toward the others, over decades. The whole effort took the better part of a century. The South Carolina section — the stretch that crosses through Horry and Georgetown counties, crossing the North Carolina line just above Little River — was built between 1739 and 1750, making it one of the last sections completed. By the early 1750s, for the first time, a traveler could ride an uninterrupted road from Boston to Charleston, roughly 1,300 miles, without having to find a boat or bushwhack through forest.

It was, even by contemporary accounts, not a pleasant road. Travelers who rode the section between Wilmington and Charleston described it as among the most tedious and disagreeable stretches of road on the continent. The coastal plain offered mile after mile of pine barren and swamp. The rivers and swashes had to be forded or ferried, and the timing of both was hostage to the tides. Sandy soil grabbed at wagon wheels. The bridges that existed were poorly maintained, and the ones that did not exist required travellers to wade or swim. George Washington, a man who had crossed the Delaware River in a blizzard with an army at his back, would later record his particular frustration with the Grand Strand swashes. Even the first president had to wait for the tide.

Building the Road Through the Grand Strand

The Grand Strand section of the King’s Highway presented particular engineering challenges. The barrier island geography of the northern Grand Strand — shallow swashes that flooded at high tide, soft sand that gave no footing for horses, and the broad exposure of the open beach strand between river crossings — meant that the road here was less a built road than a managed corridor. Travelers relied on local knowledge as much as on any formal road surface. The swash crossings in particular demanded both precise timing and a guide who understood the tidal rhythms.

The road ran inland from the coast in many stretches — cutting through pine barrens behind the barrier islands — but in the northern Grand Strand, where the geography permitted, travelers sometimes rode the beach strand itself, using the hard-packed wet sand at the tideline as the road surface. This is exactly what Washington would do in 1791: cross the swash at what is now Singleton Swash near North Myrtle Beach, ride south along the open beach for sixteen miles, and then cut inland again to reach the settlements around Pawleys Island and Georgetown. The beach was the road. The tide was the traffic signal. The local guide was the GPS.

The families who settled along this stretch of the King’s Highway became, in effect, the infrastructure of the route. They ran the public houses where travelers ate and slept. They maintained the ferries across the larger rivers. They served as guides across the swashes. The Gause family operated a tavern near the North Carolina line beginning around 1740 — the same family whose house Washington would breakfast at on the morning of April 27, 1791. The Vereen family farmed and fished the land just south of Singleton Swash, and Jeremiah Vereen became the region’s acknowledged expert on tidal crossings. When the first president of the United States needed to cross that swash, Vereen was the man he asked.

The Boundary House: Where the Revolution Arrived in South Carolina

Before the King’s Highway carried Washington south in peace, it carried revolution north in alarm. On April 19, 1775 — the morning the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts — a postal rider was already preparing to carry the dispatch south along the King’s Highway. The news moved fast by the standards of the era, but the era’s standards were measured in days and weeks, not hours. By May 9, 1775, the dispatch had traveled roughly a thousand miles south and arrived at the Boundary House, a colonial-era private residence and public house sitting directly on the South Carolina–North Carolina line near Little River.

The man who received it was Isaac Marion — the eldest brother of Francis Marion, who would within five years become the most famous guerrilla commander in the American Revolution and earn the name the Swamp Fox. Isaac read the dispatch and immediately forwarded it to the Committee of Safety in Little River. From Little River it moved south to Georgetown, and from Georgetown to Charleston. The news of the first shots of the Revolution traveled to South Carolina along the King’s Highway, and its first stop on South Carolina soil was this small public house in Little River. The British themselves had built the road that carried the news of their own undoing to the southernmost reaches of their American colonies.

Walter Hill, director of the Horry County Museum in Conway and a historian who has studied the King’s Highway in depth, has put it plainly: the King’s Road is the thoroughfare that delivered the news of Lexington and Concord to South Carolina, and it arrived first at the Boundary House in Little River. A historical marker erected by Horry County in 2005 — placed on the left side of U.S. 17 at the Heather Lakes Drive intersection — commemorates this. It is easy to miss at highway speed. It is worth stopping for.

Washington Plans the Southern Tour

By the spring of 1791, George Washington was two years into his first term as president of a republic that was still, in practical terms, an experiment. The Constitution had been ratified. The new federal government had been assembled. But the question of whether ordinary citizens from Virginia to Georgia actually trusted this new government — felt it was their government, felt its authority as legitimate rather than merely theoretical — was still very much open. Washington understood this the way a general understands terrain. He had been thinking about a tour of the southern states since at least October 1789, when John Jay told him such a visit would be expected.

He set out from Philadelphia on March 21, 1791, traveling in a white chariot painted with the four seasons on its doors and the Washington coat of arms on its panels, drawn by four brown horses. Outriders in bright red-and-white livery accompanied the procession. Major William Jackson served as his aide. A valet de chambre, two footmen, a coachman, and a postilion rounded out the party. Four saddle horses traveled with them, including Prescott, Washington’s tall white charger, in case the president wished to ride rather than be driven. The whole procession was unmistakable and deliberately so — this was not a quiet tour of inspection but a public statement of presidential presence in every region the new republic claimed as its own.

Washington’s route took him south from Philadelphia through Virginia and the Carolinas, targeting every significant town along the eastern seaboard before turning inland for the return journey through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. He kept his diary throughout — the same meticulous diary he had maintained for decades, recording distances, road conditions, the names of houses where he slept, the names of the men and women who received him, and the quality of the terrain through which he passed. His diary entries from April 27 and 28, 1791, are the primary documentary record of what happened when the first president of the United States crossed onto the Grand Strand.

April 27, 1791: The President Crosses Into South Carolina

That morning Washington breakfasted at the home of William Gause, near Ocean Isle Beach in Brunswick County, North Carolina — about ten miles from the state line. The Gause family had operated a tavern for travelers on the King’s Highway since around 1740, and Washington’s breakfast there was both a practical necessity and a political gesture: stopping at the homes of prominent local families was how the tour worked, how Washington pressed the flesh of the republic’s emerging gentry class and assured them that Philadelphia knew their names.

In his diary, Washington recorded the day with his characteristic precision. He crossed the boundary line between North and South Carolina, he wrote, at about half past twelve o’clock — roughly ten miles from Gause’s. Two miles further he dined at a private house belonging to a man named Cochran, a Revolutionary War veteran who lived near Little River. And then, he wrote, he lodged at Mr. Vareen’s — fourteen miles more and about two miles short of the long bay. Vareen’s plantation sat near the intersection of what is now U.S. 17 and Lake Arrowhead Road, just south of Singleton Swash. Washington noted that he was entertained there very kindly, without being able to make compensation. Jeremiah Vereen refused to take the president’s money. It is the kind of detail that makes a diary entry human.

The Night at the Vereen Plantation

The Vereen family were among the earliest European settlers of the northern Grand Strand. Their land sat in the geography that most challenged travelers on the King’s Highway: the stretch of tidal swashes, barrier islands, and open beach that made the road here less a road than a series of judgment calls about wind, tide, and sand. Jeremiah Vereen — scholars debate whether Washington’s host was Jeremiah Sr. or his son Jeremiah Jr. — was the acknowledged expert on those crossings. He knew Singleton Swash the way a harbor pilot knows a channel: by feel, by experience, and by the kind of local knowledge that cannot be acquired from a map.

Washington’s party spent the night at the Vereen plantation. It was not a grand accommodation — the president had been disappointed throughout his journey that the distances between public houses in the Carolinas forced him repeatedly into private homes, where he felt the burden of being an unexpected houseguest on families who could not possibly have prepared for a presidential visit. But Vereen, whose home sat at the gateway to the most difficult stretch of the Grand Strand route, was accustomed to travelers. And in the morning, he did what he had done for countless others who needed to cross the swash: he guided them.

April 28: Onto the Long Beach of the Ocean

Washington’s diary entry for April 28, 1791 is, by his own spare standards, almost lyrical. He wrote that Mr. Vareen piloted them across the swash — which at high water is impassable and at times, by the shifting of the sands, is dangerous — on the long beach of the ocean. And it being at a proper time of the tide, they passed along it with ease and celerity to the place of quitting it, which is estimated sixteen miles.

Sixteen miles along the hard-packed Atlantic beach, with the surf breaking to the east and the open sky overhead. The swash crossing was at what we now call Singleton Swash, near the Dunes Golf and Beach Club. The sixteen miles of beach ran south through what is now the heart of North Myrtle Beach and into the northern end of Myrtle Beach, before Washington’s party turned inland toward the home of George Pawley — whose family name the island and the community of Pawleys Island still carry today. The diary records that they had dinner there and fed their horses, and then rode ten more miles to the home of a Doctor Flagg, where they spent the night. Thirty-three miles from Vereen’s in a day that began with a tidal crossing at dawn.

The beach Washington rode is the same beach that visitors walk today between Cherry Grove and the southern end of Windy Hill. The Atlantic has moved somewhat — barrier beaches migrate over centuries — but the essential character of the place, the exposure and the width and the way the wind comes off the ocean with nothing to slow it, has not changed. Washington’s carriage and horses would have been moving along a beach that looks, in its fundamentals, very much like the beach a visitor sees from an oceanfront rental balcony today.

Windy Hill: A Name Born From That Morning

Here the history shades into tradition — and tradition, on the Grand Strand, is worth taking seriously even when it cannot be pinned to a diary entry. Local accounts, preserved in Horry County historical records and in the institutional memory of the communities that would eventually become North Myrtle Beach, hold that the area known as Windy Hill got its name in connection with Washington’s 1791 visit. The exposed coastal dunes and open beach of this particular stretch of the strand were memorably windy, and Washington’s passage gave the community its occasion to name what the wind already made plain.

The precise version of the story varies depending on who is telling it. Some accounts say Washington’s hat blew off repeatedly as his party crossed the open dune line; others say he remarked on the wind while crossing an exposed rise. The North Myrtle Beach High School’s own institutional history notes honestly that the hat story is “one myth about his time here.” What is not myth is Washington’s documented presence, his documented route along the beach strand through this area, and the documented windiness of the site — all of which the local community threaded together into a name that stuck through two centuries and three incorporations, all the way to the 1968 merger that made Windy Hill one of the four original communities of North Myrtle Beach.

Whether you favor the hat version or the dune version, the underlying fact is the same: a name that appears today on vacation rental listings and real estate signs and road signs up and down the Windy Hill beachfront traces its origins to a blustery April morning in 1791 when the first president of the United States rode sixteen miles along this shore and the wind off the Atlantic made him know exactly where he was.

Washington Continues South: Pawleys, Hampton Plantation, and the Washington Oak

After leaving the beach strand and dining at George Pawley’s house, Washington continued south toward Georgetown, which he reached on April 30. He spent the night in Georgetown and then, on the morning of May 1, traveled south to Hampton Plantation near McClellanville — a working rice plantation owned by the Horry family, whose name you will recognize from the county that surrounds Myrtle Beach. Hampton Plantation was where Washington had what may be the most remembered moment of his entire Grand Strand passage.

He was received there for breakfast by Eliza Lucas Pinckney — the pioneering agricultural scientist who had introduced indigo cultivation to South Carolina decades earlier and who was, at this point in her life, in her seventies and one of the most celebrated women in the state. Her daughter Harriott Horry received him alongside her. At some point during the visit, Washington was asked about a large live oak tree growing in front of the plantation house. The tree was old, perhaps too close to the house, and the family was considering removing it. Washington looked at the tree. He said, according to the account that has been passed down through multiple sources, let the tree stand. The tree stood. It stands today — now estimated to be somewhere around 270 years old, a living oak on the grounds of Hampton Plantation State Historic Site, still called the Washington Oak. Hampton Plantation is open to visitors and is about an hour’s drive south of North Myrtle Beach oceanfront homes.

The Road Today: Where You Can Walk It

The King’s Highway did not disappear. It evolved. U.S. Highway 17 — the road that enters South Carolina just north of Little River and runs south through the Grand Strand all the way to Georgetown and beyond — is its direct descendant. The SC Encyclopedia calls U.S. 17 “the linear descendant of the King’s Highway.” In some stretches, modern U.S. 17 follows the exact colonial path. In others, the roads diverge — developers, hurricanes, and infrastructure projects have moved things around over three centuries. Kings Highway was not paved until 1940. For its first two centuries, it was the same sandy, rutted, tide-dependent track that Washington described as among the more challenging roads he had encountered in a lifetime of riding difficult terrain.

The best place in the Grand Strand to walk a preserved section of the original roadbed is the Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens in Little River, at 2250 SC-179. The gardens preserve a stretch of the old path within about fifty feet of the current U.S. 17 — you can stand on the original roadbed and watch modern traffic pass fifty feet away. It is open daily and free. The walking trails wind through old-growth coastal forest where enormous live oaks and longleaf pines shade a path that postal riders, militia troops, British soldiers, enslaved people, merchants, and at least one president traveled before the United States had a Supreme Court. It is one of the most historically significant and least-visited public spaces on the entire Grand Strand.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is Article 2 of the Thomas Beach Vacations America 250 & the Grand Strand series. Read the series hub for the full nine-article overview, or continue with Article 1: Pirates, Planters, and the Birth of the Grand Strand. Historical facts verified against Washington’s published diary entries (The Diaries of George Washington, University Press of Virginia, 1979), the South Carolina Encyclopedia entries for King’s Highway, Highway 17, and North Myrtle Beach, the Horry County Historical Society’s Boundary House marker documentation, and Grand Strand Magazine’s feature on the Kings Road. Thomas Beach Vacations is a locally owned vacation rental company serving North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Note: This article replaces the earlier TBV article on the King’s Highway published in 2023; that URL now redirects here.

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.

How North Myrtle Beach Became the Soul of the Grand Strand

There is a sign on the edge of the city that reads: Welcome to North Myrtle Beach, Home of the Shag. It shows two dancers mid-step, caught in that easy, unhurried rhythm that has defined this stretch of South Carolina coastline for more than eighty years. The sign is not wrong, but it is incomplete. North Myrtle Beach is a city built from four separate communities with four separate identities, tested by one of the most destructive hurricanes in American history, shaped by a dance born from the cross-pollination of Black and white musical traditions, and eventually incorporated into a single city whose residents still quietly insist they are from Cherry Grove, or Ocean Drive, or Crescent Beach, or Windy Hill. The name on the sign belongs to everyone. The identity belongs to wherever you grew up on these nine miles of coast.

The story of North Myrtle Beach does not begin in 1968, when the city was officially incorporated. It begins in the 1740s, when William Gause obtained a land grant near what is now Windy Hill Beach and set up a tavern along the Kings Highway for travelers heading between the Carolinas. It runs through rice plantations and timber operations and covered wagons, through fishing families who understood the rhythms of this coast long before anyone thought to build a hotel on it. And it finds its clearest voice in the pavilions and dance halls of Ocean Drive, where the Carolina Shag was born and where it still lives today with a stubbornness and joy that no amount of time seems capable of diminishing.

Understanding North Myrtle Beach means understanding what makes it distinct from the 60-mile Grand Strand it anchors at its northern end. This is not the high-rise density of downtown Myrtle Beach. This is something older, more personal, and in many ways more deeply rooted. A community that survived a Category 4 hurricane, rebuilt from rubble, invented a state dance, and chose to merge four stubborn, independent towns into one city rather than disappear from the map. Not a bad origin story.

Four Communities Before There Was One City

The territory that is now North Myrtle Beach was originally home to the Waccamaw and Winyah peoples, who called the broader coastal region Chicora and understood this land as a seasonal resource long before European colonization arrived. The area remained largely inaccessible to outside settlement well into the 1800s — a combination of geography, marshland, and the absence of reliable roads kept the coastline isolated from the rest of South Carolina. A handful of early families — the Bellamys, Bessants, Nixons, and Vereens — acquired large tracts along the shore, but the plantation culture that defined so much of the South Carolina coast farther south never fully took hold here. Instead, subsistence farming, fishing, and logging became the rhythms of life for generations.

Meaningful tourist development began to arrive in the early twentieth century, accelerated by the extension of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad to the Grand Strand in 1904 and by the steady increase in automobile travel that came with the paving of the Kings Highway. By the 1940s, four distinct beach communities had taken shape along the northern strand, each with its own character and its own investors. Cherry Grove Beach emerged from the merger of two older properties in 1950, when an inlet separating Futch Beach from the Nixon family’s land was filled in. Ocean Drive Beach, incorporated in June 1948 with a population of two to three hundred full-time residents, was developed by investors from Florence, South Carolina, who built a pavilion and amusement park that became the social and cultural heart of the northern coast. Crescent Beach occupied the center ground with its quiet residential character. Windy Hill Beach, developed by Conway investors in the postwar years, rounded out the group at the southern end.

These four communities were never particularly unified. They competed for visitors, disagreed on governance, and maintained separate identities with a fierceness that anyone who has spent time in small Southern towns will immediately recognize. They shared a coastline, but they shared little else until a Category 4 hurricane arrived in October 1954 and changed the calculation entirely.

Hurricane Hazel: The Storm That Reshaped Everything

On the morning of October 15, 1954, Hurricane Hazel made landfall near the North Carolina-South Carolina border as a Category 4 storm, hitting directly on top of what is now North Myrtle Beach. The timing was catastrophic in a specific and almost unbelievable way: Hazel arrived at the exact moment of the highest lunar tide of the year, producing an 18-foot storm surge that swept across the barrier islands with a force that erased decades of development in a matter of hours. Wind gusts reached 160 miles per hour. Every pier along 170 miles of coastline was demolished. The name Hazel was permanently retired from use for Atlantic hurricanes — one of only a handful of storm names to receive that distinction.

Historical records from the Horry County Archives Center at Coastal Carolina University document the scale of destruction across the four communities: 450 structures destroyed at Ocean Drive, 300 at Cherry Grove, 200 at Crescent Beach, and 120 at Windy Hill. The Roberts Pavilion on Main Street in Ocean Drive — built in 1936 by William Roberts, one of the original open-air dance pavilions on the Grand Strand where beach music played on jukeboxes and the Shag was danced by teenagers in the postwar years — was completely demolished. A three-story hotel and an 800-foot pier were washed out to sea. The storm killed just one person in South Carolina, a number that speaks to the remarkable advance notice residents received, even amid the chaos of a coastline with no functioning radio station during the final hours before landfall.

The aftermath contained something unexpected. Many property owners, daunted by the scale of what rebuilding would require, chose instead to sell their land at bargain prices. This created larger consolidated parcels that developers could acquire at low cost and build upon at scale — replacing the small beach cottages and single-family homes that had lined the oceanfront with the first generation of hotels and commercial properties. Hurricane Hazel, paradoxically, became the engine of the Grand Strand’s first real development boom. The beach that emerged from the rubble was physically different from the one that had preceded it — and within a decade, it was drawing more visitors than it ever had before.

1968: Four Towns Become One City

By the early 1960s, the case for consolidation was becoming difficult to ignore. Four separate municipal governments serving a combined population of roughly 4,000 permanent residents along seven miles of coastline was an inefficient arrangement, and the shared infrastructure challenges — roads, utilities, public safety — made cooperation increasingly necessary. The idea of merging had been floated before and rejected, but a steering committee organized in 1967 under Elbert Jordan finally gained the pledges needed from all four municipalities to put the question to voters.

The vote passed in March 1968. On May 7 of that year, the South Carolina Legislature passed legislation incorporating the four communities — Cherry Grove Beach, Ocean Drive Beach, Crescent Beach, and Windy Hill Beach — into the City of North Myrtle Beach, with Robert L. Edge as the first mayor. The naming of the new city was not without its lighter moments: among the alternatives considered and rejected were Grandest Grand Strand Beach, Honey Hill Beach, Ocean City, Palm City, Petticoat Junction Beach, and Peyton Place Beach. North Myrtle Beach, as names go, was clearly the sensible choice.

One community notably absent from the merger was Atlantic Beach — a historically Black resort town that had developed in the gap between Windy Hill and Crescent Beach, incorporated in 1966 and choosing to remain independent at the time of the consolidation. Atlantic Beach is today still its own municipality, bordered on three sides by North Myrtle Beach, and its story represents a distinct and important thread in the history of the northern Grand Strand during the era of segregation. As the South Carolina Encyclopedia notes, Atlantic Beach declined the invitation to join and has remained an independent municipality to this day.

The decades following incorporation brought rapid growth. The permanent population grew from roughly 1,957 residents in 1970 to more than 8,600 by 1990 — an increase of over 340 percent in two decades. Multi-story condominiums and hotels began replacing single-family oceanfront homes. The communities developed shared infrastructure, a unified identity for marketing purposes, and the kind of consolidated civic pride that allowed each neighborhood to maintain its distinct character while benefiting from the resources of a single governing body. Today North Myrtle Beach’s population stands at approximately 18,790 permanent residents, with that figure multiplying many times over during peak summer season.

The Carolina Shag: A Dance Born on Ocean Drive

If North Myrtle Beach has a single cultural contribution that is entirely, irreducibly its own, it is the Carolina Shag. A smooth, six-count, eight-step partner dance set to the rhythm of beach music — a genre sometimes described as rhythm and blues slowed down to match the pace of a South Carolina summer afternoon — the Shag emerged in the late 1930s and early 1940s from African American dance traditions along the Grand Strand. Black musicians and dancers had developed their own clubs and open-air pavilions along the coast during the era of segregation, where rhythm and blues — then known as race music and largely shut out of mainstream radio — was performed and danced with a freedom and fluency that was unavailable on the other side of the color line.

Young white vacationers and college students, drawn to that sound and those movements through the proximity that beach culture created even within the confines of a segregated South, adapted what they observed into their own version. By the 1940s and 1950s, the clubs and pavilions along Main Street in Ocean Drive had become the proving ground for what would eventually be called the Carolina Shag — a dance that one veteran teacher famously described as the jitterbug on valium, slowed down to adapt to the warmth and the weight of the coastal South. The footwork is deceptively intricate. The posture is relaxed. The overall effect is of two people having a genuinely good time without working very hard at it, which turns out to be a fairly accurate description of the North Myrtle Beach philosophy in general.

The Roberts Pavilion on Main Street — later rebuilt as the Ocean Drive Pavilion after Hazel’s destruction — was one of the earliest and most important stages for the dance’s development. An open-air oceanfront pavilion built in 1936, it served as the gathering point for generations of young beach visitors who danced on its floors to jukebox rhythm and blues. When the pavilion’s operators eventually moved entertainment indoors and removed the jukebox, the shaggers migrated up Main Street to the clubs that lined the boulevard. The dance found new homes. It always has.

Roberts Pavilion Dance Floor

In 1984, the South Carolina General Assembly made it official: the Carolina Shag is the State Dance of South Carolina. That same year, the first National Shag Dance Championship was held. The dance had survived the 1960s, when rock and roll briefly threatened its popularity, and the 1970s, when disco took the floor. It came roaring back in the 1980s through a revival driven by older dancers who brought competition and institutional structure to what had previously been an informal tradition. Shag clubs formed across both Carolinas. The Society of Stranders — known universally by its initials, SOS — was established as the umbrella organization for dozens of member clubs, and it began hosting its major annual gatherings on Main Street in Ocean Drive: the Spring Safari in April and the Fall Migration in September, described by participants as the biggest adult party on the East Coast.

The OD Pavilion: Where Generations Gathered

At the corner of Main Street and Ocean Boulevard in the Ocean Drive section sits the OD Pavilion — not quite a landmark in the polished, institutional sense, but something more significant: a place that belongs to everyone who has ever come of age on these beaches. The original structure, Roberts Pavilion, was built in 1936 by William Roberts and served as one of the first open-air oceanfront pavilions on the Grand Strand. When Hurricane Hazel leveled it in 1954, it was rebuilt between 1955 and 1957 using salvaged timbers and the same foundation — a detail that carries a particular kind of poetic weight in a community that rebuilt so much of itself from what the storm left behind. A historical marker erected in 2007 by the OD Pavilion Social Shag Club commemorates the site at the intersection of Main Street and Ocean Boulevard.

For the generations of young people who vacationed in North Myrtle Beach through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the OD Pavilion was the center of gravity. It was where you went when you arrived, where you arranged to meet your friends, where you spent the hours between the beach and wherever the night was going. Its sandy dance floor, its jukebox, its open-air design that let the ocean breeze move through the music — these were the specific physical conditions that shaped a culture. The 1989 film Shag — which starred Bridget Fonda and Phoebe Cates and was filmed partly in North Myrtle Beach — captured something of what that culture felt like, and introduced the Shag and the OD scene to audiences who had never experienced the real thing.

Today, the OD Pavilion continues to operate at 3500 North Ocean Boulevard as North Myrtle Beach’s only seaside amusement park, hosting rides, games, and a sandy dance floor that remains one of the last open-air beach music pavilions of its kind on the East Coast. DJs spin beach music seven nights a week during the season, and the pavilion hosts shag events from April through November. It is a place where a twelve-year-old on a first beach vacation and a seventy-year-old on their fiftieth can occupy the same dance floor with equal legitimacy — which is, in the end, what the Shag has always been about.

Fat Harold’s and the Living Shag Culture

If the OD Pavilion is the historical heart of the Shag, Fat Harold’s Beach Club at 212 Main Street is its beating present tense. The original Fat Harold’s was located across the street from the OD Pavilion — on a parking lot that now holds the faint memory of what it once was — alongside another legendary club called The Pad, which opened on July 4, 1955, and burned down in 1987. The original Fat Harold’s was torn down in 1988, but the club was reborn in a new building on Main Street and has been there ever since, inducted into the Carolina Beach Music Awards Hall of Fame in 1996 and drawing dancers from across North America to its floors every week of the year.

Fat Harold’s offers free shag lessons every Tuesday night beginning at 7 p.m. — a two-hour session that starts with a narrated history of the dance and how it evolved in the Ocean Drive community. The club’s Front Room is where the serious shaggers go, and where first-timers are welcomed with a generosity that speaks to the particular spirit of the Shag community: a community that has always believed the dance belongs to anyone willing to step onto the floor. DJs spin seven nights a week, and live bands perform for major events including the SOS gatherings. More than a bar, Fat Harold’s functions as an institution — the kind of place that cities rarely produce but never forget once they have it.

The physical landscape of Shag culture on Main Street extends beyond any single venue. Duck’s Nightclub, the Spanish Galleon, Harold’s on the Ocean, and the OD Arcade and Lounge each play their part in a living ecosystem of beach music and dancing that operates year-round and intensifies to a remarkable degree during the SOS gatherings each April and September. A Shag Walk of Fame runs along Main Street, commemorating the figures who shaped the dance’s history. The Shaggers Hall of Fame Museum occupies a space inside the Ocean Drive Beach and Golf Resort at 98 North Ocean Boulevard, with free admission and exhibits that place the dance in its full cultural and social context. When North Myrtle Beach marked the fortieth anniversary of the Shag’s designation as the state dance in 2024, the city proclaimed the year of the Shag — a recognition that this is not a nostalgia project but a living tradition that continues to recruit new practitioners every season.

Landmarks That Tell the Story

The North Myrtle Beach Area Historical Museum at 799 Second Avenue North opened on April 7, 2013, after eight years of planning and community effort. Its mission is to preserve the cultural history of all four of the city’s original communities, with exhibits covering the area’s first inhabitants through the full arc of tourism development on the northern Grand Strand. Inside, visitors will find a wooden shag dance floor, a jukebox that plays 45s, Weejuns — the shoe of the Shag — displayed alongside other memorabilia, historical maps, personal items from notable North Myrtle Beach residents including Vanna White, marine life exhibits, and artifacts from Cherry Grove, Ocean Drive, Crescent Beach, and Windy Hill. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and admission is free. It is a small museum in the physical sense, but an essential one for anyone who wants to understand what this city actually is beneath the vacation rental listings and the restaurant menus.

Cherry Grove Pier has been extending 985 feet into the Atlantic since it was first built in the early 1950s, making it one of the oldest and most-loved landmarks on the northern Grand Strand. From its raised gazebo at the end, on a clear morning, you can see the coastline running from Little River down toward Myrtle Beach in a single unbroken arc of sand and water that gives you the full measure of what the Grand Strand actually looks like. The pier has a tackle shop, a restaurant and bar, and a two-story observation deck. It holds a particular place in the record books: in 1964, Walter Maxwell of Charlotte caught a 1,780-pound tiger shark from its boards — still the only all-tackle world record catch in South Carolina history.

Barefoot Landing, the waterfront shopping and entertainment complex at the southern end of North Myrtle Beach along the Intracoastal Waterway, opened in 1988 and brought a different kind of anchor to the community — one oriented toward evening entertainment, dining, and the kind of casual waterside strolling that families do when the beach day is done. It is home to the Alabama Theatre, which has packed the house since the mid-1990s with its current house band The Bounty Hunters, and the House of Blues, co-founded by Dan Aykroyd and hosting national touring acts in one of the Grand Strand’s premier concert venues. Barefoot Landing also sits adjacent to Alligator Adventure, a 15-acre reptile park that has been welcoming families for more than thirty years and holds the distinction of housing Utan — one of the largest crocodiles in the United States, measuring over 20 feet in length.

Notable North Myrtle Beach residents have added their own threads to the city’s identity. Vanna White, co-host of Wheel of Fortune for more than four decades and arguably the most recognizable face on American television during the 1980s and 1990s, was born and raised here. Kelly Tilghman, the PGA Tour’s first female lead golf announcer, grew up in North Myrtle Beach. The Surf Golf and Beach Club, founded in the 1940s, is the oldest golf course in the area — predating the golf boom that would eventually transform the entire Grand Strand into one of the world’s premier golf destinations.

Beyond the History: North Myrtle Beach Today

All of this history underlies a city that functions today as one of the most appealing vacation destinations on the East Coast precisely because it has never fully surrendered its character to the demands of mass tourism. North Myrtle Beach is quieter than its neighbor to the south without being sleepy. It has wide, uncrowded beaches, a Main Street culture that is genuinely alive rather than preserved in amber, a fishing pier that has been drawing people out over the Atlantic for more than seventy years, and a shag dance scene that continues to generate new devotees every single season.

The four original communities retain their identities in ways that matter to visitors who take the time to notice. Cherry Grove Beach is the northernmost community, with its fishing pier, its wide-open sand, and the kind of unhurried pace that makes mornings here feel like a different planet from the boardwalk scene fifteen miles to the south. Ocean Drive is the cultural and historical center — Main Street, the shag clubs, the pavilion, the Walk of Fame, the Hall of Fame Museum, the intersection where everything that is most distinctively North Myrtle Beach about North Myrtle Beach converges. Crescent Beach sits in the residential middle, quieter and more settled in its rhythms, the kind of beach neighborhood where the same families have been coming for three generations. Windy Hill anchors the southern end with Barefoot Landing nearby and the Intracoastal Waterway running behind it — a community that offers ocean access and waterway views in equal measure.

The full history of this place is preserved and celebrated at the North Myrtle Beach Area Historical Museum. The Shag is danced year-round at Fat Harold’s, the OD Pavilion, and the clubs of Main Street. The pier at Cherry Grove still catches fish and still catches sunrises. And the nine miles of coastline that four stubborn beach communities chose to share in 1968 continue to draw visitors who return year after year, some of them because of the history, most of them because once you have spent a week here, the pull of the place is genuinely difficult to explain to anyone who has not felt it.

Frequently Asked Questions

A city with this much history deserves to be experienced slowly — a few days at Cherry Grove Pier, a Tuesday night at Fat Harold’s, a morning at the Historical Museum, and as many sunrises as you can fit into the trip. Thomas Beach Vacations has oceanfront homes and condos throughout all four communities of North Myrtle Beach, ready for your next visit. Browse the full collection at northmyrtlebeachvacations.com or call (866) 249-2100 to find the right property for your Grand Strand story.