Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

• 1. Introduction

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  Myrtle Beach sits at the center of a 60-mile ribbon of shoreline on the northeastern coast of South Carolina, and more than 20 million people visit it every single year. That number dwarfs the city's year-round population of 35,682 people recorded in the 2020 census. How did a stretch of sandy, storm-battered coast that was once described by one of its early settlers as a deliberate retreat from society become one of the most visited destinations in the United States? The answers run through a hurricane that swallowed a house, a railroad built to haul timber, a widow who named a town after a shrub, and a legal battle over motorcycle helmet laws that reached the South Carolina Supreme Court.

• 2. The Waccamaw and the First Settlers

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  Long before any European foot touched the Grand Strand, the Waccamaw people used the river for travel and fished the shores near Little River. Waties Island, the primary barrier island along Long Bay, still holds evidence of burial mounds and shell mounds left behind by the Waccamaw. The first European settlers arrived in the late 18th century carrying ambitions of extending the plantation system to the coast, but the sandy soil resisted them. Indigo and tobacco, the two major commodity crops of the region, yielded inferior results on this land, and the records from that period are fragmentary at best.

  Several families received colonial land grants along the coast, among them John, Richard, William, and Mary Withers. The Withers family took an area around what is now known as Wither's Swash. Mary Withers's gravestone at Prince George Winyah Parish Church captures something of the isolation of the place: she "gave up the pleasures of Society and retired to Long Bay, where she resided a great part of her life devoted to the welfare of her children." A separate grant went to James Minor, whose barrier island, then called Minor Island, is now Waties Island.

  George Washington passed through the area during a scouting tour of the Southern states, spending a night at Windy Hill, which is part of what is now North Myrtle Beach. He was led across Wither's Swash to Georgetown by a local man named Jeremiah Vereen. Despite that notable passage, the coastline stayed essentially empty. Then in 1822, a powerful hurricane swept the house of R. F. Withers directly into the ocean, drowning 18 people inside. That catastrophe persuaded the Withers family to abandon their coastal plots entirely, and the land began reverting to forest.

• 3. Railroad, Timber, and a New Name

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  In 1881, the Burroughs and Collins Company of Conway purchased much of the land the Withers family had abandoned. The community growing on that land was known informally as "New Town" around the turn of the 20th century. A post office named "Withers" had been established in 1888 to serve the site. Then on the 28th of February 1899, Burroughs and Collins received a charter to build the Conway and Seashore Railroad, originally intended to move timber from the coast to inland customers. The railroad began daily service on the 1st of May 1900, running two wood-burning locomotives. One of the engines, dubbed The Black Maria, had come second-hand from a logging operation in North Carolina.

  The railroad employees were the first to discover the beach for leisure. On their free weekends, they would ride flatcars down to the shore, becoming in the process the first recognizable Grand Strand tourists. Franklin Burroughs had envisioned turning New Town into a destination that could rival the beaches of Florida and the northeastern United States. He died in 1897 before the vision was realized, but his sons completed the railroad's extension to the beach and opened the Seaside Inn in 1901.

  Around 1900, a naming contest was held for the growing community. It was Burroughs's widow who suggested honoring the southern wax myrtle, known by its botanical name Myrica cerifera, which grew in abundance along the coast. The Withers post office soon changed its name to Myrtle Beach. The community incorporated as a town in 1938 and as a city in 1957. In 1940, Kings Highway was finally paved, giving the city its first primary road link to the outside world.

• 4. Golf Capital and the Tourism Machine

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  Tiger Woods declared Myrtle Beach "the mecca of golf" when he visited in 1997, and the numbers behind that claim are striking. The area recorded 4.2 million rounds of golf played, the most ever documented there, and the number of courses more than doubled over a 20-year period before leveling off. By the time the source data was compiled, the area held roughly 100 golf courses, along with more than 30 miniature golf courses. Chinese investment in the local golf market has been substantial enough to result in 25 or more courses being owned or operated by Chinese nationals, and that investment has drawn a significant surge of Chinese tourists to the region.

  Golf is only part of the picture. The Myrtle Beach Boardwalk, which opened in 2010, was recognized by National Geographic as the third-best boardwalk in the country. The Myrtle Beach Skywheel joined the boardwalk in May 2011 as a 200-foot observation wheel with glass gondolas looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, described as the first wheel of its kind in the United States. Nearly 100,000 international visitors travel to the Grand Strand each year, arriving from Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom among other countries. The area also holds over 1,900 restaurants and approximately 425 hotels.

  The Myrtle Beach Convention Center, which opened in 2003, draws conferences and exhibitions throughout the year and includes a Sheraton hotel and resort. Myrtle Beach State Park, established in 1935, preserves just under a mile of Grand Strand beach and offers camping, swimming, hiking, and fishing. The Gay Dolphin Gift Cove on the Boardwalk, built in 1946, sells seashells and local souvenirs and claims the title of the nation's largest gift shop.

• 5. Motorcycle Rallies and the Law

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  Myrtle Beach Bike Week, sometimes called "Harley Bike Week," was first held in 1940, the same year Kings Highway was paved. The event has drawn as many as 200,000 visitors to the city every May. Black Bike Week, founded in 1980 and held around Memorial Day Weekend, is the largest African American motorcycle rally in the United States and has attracted as many as 400,000 visitors. The event came into existence as a direct response to a documented history of discrimination against African American visitors and riders along the Grand Strand.

  The city of Myrtle Beach passed 15 new ordinances aimed at shutting down sanctioned motorcycle events within its limits, actions that generated lawsuits from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People against local businesses. Those suits were settled with agreements requiring that discrimination cease, that compensation be paid to some plaintiffs, and that employees receive diversity training. The NAACP's separate suit against the city itself was settled in 2006 without the city paying damages, but with the commitment that police would apply the same traffic control rules during both the Black and the white motorcycle rallies.

  The legal battle did not end there. The South Carolina Supreme Court, ruling unanimously in June 2010, struck down one of the 15 ordinances, the one requiring all motorcyclists to wear helmets, on the grounds that state law required helmets only for riders under 21 and could not be overridden by a city ordinance. A group of motorcyclists and a coalition of businesses called BOOST, which stood for Business Owners Organized to Support Tourism, had challenged the law on the grounds that the city's anti-motorcycle policy was damaging the local economy.

• 6. Climate, Growth, and the Cost of the Shore

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  The Bermuda High pushes humidity inland from the tropical Atlantic during summer, giving Myrtle Beach a near-tropical feel in its hottest months. The warm Atlantic reaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit or higher in summer, and the record high temperature recorded in the city was 104 degrees Fahrenheit, reached on the 26th of June 1952 and again on the 5th of August 1954. At the other extreme, the coldest temperature on record was 9 degrees Fahrenheit on the 18th of February 1958. Snowfall is rare enough that a 2.8-inch snowfall in February 2010 was considered remarkable.

  Hurricanes have left their marks on this exposed coast. Hurricane Hazel in 1954 is considered the worst hurricane in Myrtle Beach's recorded history. Hurricane Hugo in 1989 was the last to cause significant damage. The city has been physically separated from the continental United States since 1936 by the Intracoastal Waterway, which constrained development within a narrow band close to the shore and left the inland areas northwest of the waterway primarily rural for years.

  That constraint has since given way to rapid growth. The Myrtle Beach metro area had an estimated population of 479,426 in 2024, and more than 104,000 people moved to the area over an eight-year period, representing a growth rate of nearly 28 percent. The median age in the city proper was 49.4 years as of the 2020 census, with 25.4 percent of residents aged 65 or older, a demographic profile shaped by decades of retirement migration to the coast. Grand Strand Medical Center, which opened on the 21st of April 1978 and holds 369 beds, serves as the only facility in the greater Myrtle Beach area with cardiac surgery and neurosurgery programs.