Conway, South Carolina

• 1. Introduction

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  Conway, South Carolina sits on the western bank of the Waccamaw River, just 14 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. A city that has been called Kingston, then Conwayborough, and finally Conway, it carries three centuries of name changes as evidence of a turbulent, layered history. Founded in 1732 under Royal Governor Robert Johnson's Township Scheme, it stands today as the county seat of Horry County. How did a colonial village loyal to one English king become a hotbed of revolutionary sympathy toward the next? How does a small city of roughly 24,849 people, barely the 18th-most populous in its state, become the home of a university, a riverwalk, and a building designed by the architect of the Washington Monument? Those are the questions that follow.

• 2. Kings Town to Conway

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  Early English colonists laid out the first settlement on a bluff overlooking the Waccamaw River and called it Kings Town, then quickly simplified it to Kingston. The year was 1732, and the founding came as part of Royal Governor Robert Johnson's deliberate Township Scheme to populate the Carolina interior. For the next three decades, from the 1730s through the 1750s, King George II was genuinely popular here. His birthday ranked among the most widely celebrated local holidays. That goodwill evaporated with his successor. By the 1770s, King George III had grown deeply unpopular among the townspeople, and Kingston's residents cheered openly when Royal Governor Lord William Campbell fled Charleston. Francis Marion, the guerrilla commander known as the "Swamp Fox", kept an encampment just across the Waccamaw River from Kingston during the Revolution. Small engagements were fought nearby, at Bear Bluff and at Black Lake. When Horry County was formally created in 1801, its courthouse was established in Kingston. The town then renamed itself Conwayborough to honor a local hero, General Robert Conway. It took the South Carolina General Assembly until 1883 to trim that to the single word Conway.

• 3. Architecture and the Riverwalk

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  One building in Conway carries a credential that surprises most visitors: the City Hall was designed by Robert Mills, the same architect responsible for the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. It is among the numerous buildings and structures in Conway listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That historic core got a second life in the 1980s, when the completion of the Main Street USA project touched off a broader downtown revitalization. Shops and bistros moved into spaces that had gone quiet. The centerpiece of that renewal is the Riverwalk, a stretch of restaurants that follows the Waccamaw River as it winds through town. The Waccamaw is not a small detail here; it defines the city's western edge, where the downtown meets the water at a creek called Kingston Lake, and flows south eventually to the Pee Dee River and out to Winyah Bay at Georgetown.

• 4. Coastal Carolina and Campus Life

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  Coastal Carolina University gives Conway a persistent pulse of student life and institutional presence. The HTC Center, a 3,370-seat multi-purpose arena on the university's campus, hosts men's and women's basketball as well as women's volleyball. It replaced an earlier facility, Kimbel Arena, for those purposes. Across the campus, Kimbel Library and the Rebecca Randall Bryan Art Gallery maintain a rotating calendar of exhibits throughout the year. Conway's educational options extend beyond the university: Horry-Georgetown Technical College, a branch of Webster University offering MBA graduate work, and the North American Institute of Aviation are all based here. The public library system is a branch of the Horry County Memorial Library. A student newspaper, The Chanticleer News, serves the university community.

• 5. Notable Residents

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  William Gibson, the author credited as the father of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, is from Conway. Scott Bessent, the 79th United States Secretary of the Treasury, is also a native. The city has produced a varied roster of athletes, including Hunter Renfrow and Bryan Edwards in American football, Grant Holmes in professional baseball, and Kristy McPherson, who competes on the LPGA Tour. Nick Shalosky, who holds the distinction of being the first openly gay elected official in South Carolina, was born here. Sheri Reynolds, author and associate professor of Southern literature at Old Dominion University, is another alumna. The city's current government, led by Mayor Barbara Blain since she was first sworn in on the 4th of January 2016, operates under a mayor-council structure with six council members who meet twice monthly at Conway Council Chambers.

• 6. Economy and Infrastructure

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  Conway's economy rests on a mix of industrial and institutional employers. New South Companies, Inc., a subsidiary of Canfor, operates in the area alongside Vulcan Materials Company and AVX Corporation. The Grainger Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant run by Santee Cooper, generated electricity from 1966 until its retirement in 2012. On the transportation side, the Conway-Horry County Airport, designated HYW, sits 4 miles west of town along US 378. Three major U.S. routes, 701, 501, and 378, pass through the city. The Coast Regional Transit Authority, formerly known as the Waccamaw Regional Transit Authority and before that as Lymo, operates bus service across much of Horry County from a primary station in downtown Conway. R. J. Corman Railroad's Carolina Line connects Conway on a branch running between Chadbourn, North Carolina and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; the historic Conway railroad depot still stands along that branch, though it now serves as an office building.