Lost Myrtle Beach

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INTRODUCTION

The history of Myrtle Beach is a joyous, tumultuous and wildly interesting story. As of 2014, it has been an incorporated city for seventy-six years, but Myrtle Beach’s unique geography helped its residents pack what would normally be a few centuries’ worth of living into a much tighter timespan.

New traditions will be made, but this is a chronicle of what has been lost. These are the voices and opinions of locals and visitors from the previous three hundred years that have been collected so they, too, are not lost.

Locals interviewed for this book feel extreme sadness for some of Myrtle Beach’s lost places and traditions. They understand the world moves on and they can’t live in a time capsule, but many want to see more of the city’s past preserved.

It is to be expected that a tourist area like Myrtle Beach would tear down old structures to make room for new and bigger ones that can house the millions of visitors who come each year, but some that are gone leave sore spots in the hearts of those who loved them. The Chesterfield Inn, the Ocean Forest Hotel and the Myrtle Beach Pavilion are places of particular note that are missed. The Sun Fun Festival isn’t a place, but those who enjoyed it for sixty years cherished the celebrities and parade and cheerful beach games.

Restaurants, bars and nightclubs are not mentioned much because my editor and I decided that so many of those businesses have opened and closed in Myrtle Beach they deserve their own book. There also wasn’t room to talk about every single landmark and amusement that has come and gone (the number of them is staggering considering Myrtle Beach’s brief history!), but significant ones are here with information about them that even natives may not have heard before now. Memories that didn’t fit into the book can be found in blog entries at beckybillingsley.com.

1

ISOLATED BEAUTY

Four hundred years ago, the Myrtle Beach area was not developed, but it had residents. The gorgeous wide beach, which is part of a large curving piece of coastline called Long Bay, was surrounded and isolated by forests, swamps, Carolina bays and rivers on three sides and the Atlantic Ocean on the east. Native Americans lived in the maritime forests.

Some of those Indians—called collectively Siouans, due to their commonality of language—had year-round camps near the coast and along tidal rivers. Others migrated to the beach with seasonal seafood rhythms. Buffalo roamed the coastal plains and were an important food source.

By the early sixteenth century, the heyday of local Native Americans was over due to the arrival of Europeans, who brought diseases such as smallpox, measles and influenza for which Native Americans had no resistance. By the mid-1700s, their numbers greatly reduced by illness, Native Americans were forced away from their lands and scattered, and some were enslaved. A tiny percentage remains today, including members of the Chicora tribe and the state-recognized Waccamaw Indian People, but they have lost the choice to live their lives as their ancestors did before Europeans came.

Since the Indians were moved from their ancestral lands, learning about their lives is difficult. They didn’t have a written language, so most historic observation is through studying their tools and pottery shards found in campsites, such as around remnants of shellfish piles, called middens, which are curiously dense with clamshells instead of oyster shells at the south end of the Grand Strand.

It’s sad that we don’t know more about our Native American culture, local historian Lee Brockington said. That loss of handing down from generation to generation—we would have known about the shell middens if [the Indians] hadn’t been removed from their land.

Although European settlers edged out the native inhabitants in the eighteenth century, the piece of coastline surrounding present-day Myrtle Beach remained isolated for generations and, therefore, was known as the Independent Republic. As area plantations utilized slave labor and the number of African Americans reached 90 percent of the South Carolina population in 1740, whites devised a plan to increase the number of white settlers. Alarmed by the burgeoning slave population, as noted in the 2009 Horry County Historic Resources Survey, the first royal governor of South Carolina, Robert Johnson, proposed a settlement plan for the frontier of the colony in 1730, hoping to attract white colonists. He offered incentives such as 50 acres of land for each family member, and funds for tools, transportation, and food with quit rents waived for 10 years.

Slowly, settlers moved in to farm, fish and make turpentine and tar from the pine trees. The beach was nice for seafood harvests and cooling swims during summer’s steamy heat, but the land itself was considered practically worthless because it was too sandy for farming. Myrtle Beach, which didn’t even have a name back then, has no deep port. Consequently, big vessels couldn’t dock there as they did in Georgetown to the south and Little River to the north.

Its surrounding swampy geography made getting to the area that is now the heart of Myrtle Beach, in the middle of Long Bay, too much trouble for most beach visitors prior to 1900. A 1757 map doesn’t show any named landmarks for miles around present-day Myrtle Beach, while a 1775 map depicts Lewis Swash at the present-day Singleton Swash. Robert Mills’s 1825 atlas of the state of South Carolina shows a huge area to the west inscribed with the ominous name Impassable Bay.

In 1784, a German traveler named Johann David Schoepf recorded his journey along the South Carolina coast, and his first stop was at Jeremiah Vareen’s tavern that was just south of present-day North Myrtle Beach. While at Vareen’s he saw "the skin of a female red tiger or cougar (Felis concolor Linn), which had been brought down in the neighborhood a few days before…The man who killed it came almost upon it in the woods, before he observed it; it fled before him from tree to tree, until he could bring it down with his gun. After leaving the tavern, Schoepf said his next stop to the south before reaching the next human habitation" was an expanse of twenty-six miles:

This 1825 Robert Mills map shows an Impassable Bay west of Myrtle Beach. Author’s collection.

Proceeding from the last-named plantation, after a few miles of woods-road, one comes to the so-called Long Bay or Beach. Here for 16 miles the common highway runs very near the shore. Lonely and desolate as this part of the road is, without shade and with no dwellings in sight, it is by no means a tedious road. The number of shells washed up, sponges, corals, sea-grasses and weeds, medusa, and many other ocean-products which strew the beach, engage and excite the attention of the traveller at every step…This beach-road consisted for the most part of shell-sand, coarse or fine, with very few, often no quartz-grains. So far as the otherwise loose sand is moistened by the play of the waves it forms an extremely smooth and firm surface, hardly showing hoof-marks. At a distance of perhaps 30-50 paces from the water, there runs parallel with it a line of low sand-swells, 3-6 ft. high and averaging 8-1-ft. across. Towards the sea these undulations were cut away almost perpendicularly, but on the other side were sloping and sparsely grown up with thin grass and bush. Those sand-swells which the ocean itself seems to have set as its limit, were notwithstanding broken through here and there, and the land lying immediately behind was much ravaged as a result of occasional overflow. The road leaving the beach, which extends far away of a similar character, one again traverses gloomy and lonesome woods to the neighborhood of the Waccama or Waggomangh, and beyond, by a narrow tongue of land between that river and the ocean, to Winguah Bay.

In 1801 the area around Long Bay finally had an official name: Horry, named after Revolutionary War hero Brigadier General Peter Horry (1747–1815). By 1810, the 2009 historic property survey says, Horry had a total population of 4,348; it was the lowest in the state by over 600 people, with 1,398 enslaved individuals, and 18 free people of color…In another decade, Horry had little growth, only reaching 5,025 people in 1820, again the lowest in the state, and by an even wider margin of 1,400 people.

By 1840, the Horry district had 5,750 residents, but the area around Myrtle Beach wasn’t yet populated enough to have a post office. The 1850 census counted 7,646 residents and 731 farms, and ten years later, in 1860, the number of residents was 7,962. The coastline shown in an 1856 map shows Lewis Swash, Eight Mile Swash and a third unnamed swash that was likely Withers Swash. By 1870, the Horry district had become Horry County, and its population was more than 10,000.

Starting in 1900, when the first train came to Myrtle Beach, the area’s deforestation began in earnest. The train that brought tourists to the area carried away its lumber.

FERRIES

Horry County is pockmarked with many bowl-shaped and water-filled depressions called Carolina bays. Some people think they were made by a long-ago major meteor shower, while others believe they were scraped out by glaciers and filled by glacial melt runoff. However the bays were created, they contain diverse wetland ecosystems that were not easy to cross.

Before 1900, there were no bridges to Long Bay, so ferries were the way to forge wetlands. The major ferry that people paid to use and get across to present-day Myrtle Beach from eastern areas like Florence and Marion was Peachtree Ferry at Socastee. Other Waccamaw River ferries, according to the late historian C.B. Berry, included Wortham’s near Brooksville, just below the North Carolina state line; Star Bluff near Wampee; Conway Ferry across Kingston Lake…Bellamy Landing near the S.C. 9 crossing; Bear Bluff and Reaves Ferry near Nixonville; Hardee Ferry at Savannah Bluff; and Cox’s Ferry Below Conway.

In his book Rum Gully Tales from Tuck ’Em Inn, Pratt Gasque (1909–1993) described crossing Peachtree Ferry:

The ferry was operated by a farmer by the name of Rufus Graham who lived on the east side of the river. Usually he was plowing a field on his farm. We would beat a piece of iron on a plowshare hanging from a tree and Rufus would take his mules to the bar, unhitch them and put them in their stalls. Then he would amble down to the ferry, which was a flat boat only large enough for one automobile. After checking the cables and nodding a greeting to us, he pulled the ferry to our side of the Waccamaw. There he secured the flat to a tree with a stout cable which kept the automobile from pushing the flat away from the bank when it was driven aboard…After paying the toll of fifty cents, we traveled a dirt and corduroy road to Socastee, where we made a stop at Cooper’s store to rest after the river crossing, to buy vegetables and check the tires and radiator.

Cooper’s Store still exists beside the Socastee swing bridge, and it is used as a reception hall. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

Another account of crossing Peachtree Ferry came from the writings of Lucile Burroughs Godfrey (1891–1974), who traveled to the beach with her family from the western part of Horry County. The long drive on sandy roads required that men and horses rest overnight. Peach Tree Landing, our first stop, is opposite Socastee, which is about five miles from the river. If you had strong lungs, the ferryman answered your call. Otherwise, you banged on an old saw or a piece of metal fastened to a post or tree. The ferry was soon across, and the exciting trip to the far-away beach began.

Kelly Paul Joyner (1915–1999) also recalled fording Peachtree Ferry. In order to get to Myrtle Beach, she wrote in a 1990 history column, we had to go to Bucksville and on to Peachtree Ferry. Uncle Luke Duncan…he wasn’t really our uncle, but everyone called him ‘uncle’…was in charge of the ferry. As we arrived at the river my father would call out in a loud voice for him to bring the ferry boat over. My father would then drive our car onto the flat boat, and we would be pulled across the river on a steel cable by large oars.

It may have been difficult to get to the beach in the early twentieth century, but the ocean’s lure was irresistible. Horry County Museum, Conway, South Carolina.

Today, the ferries are gone, and so little remains of any remnants that only people who know what to look for would see them.

SWASHES

Once people got across rivers and swamps and made it to the beach, if they wanted to continue their journey north or south, they had to deal with swashes. Swashes are creeks that end at the coast, and they are natural floodplains. They’re like drainage basins that naturally filter storm water impurities. Myrtle Beach has several swashes.

An Englishman and early Methodist preacher, Joseph Pilmoor, wrote in his journal about a five-day journey through Long Bay from February 19 to 25, 1773, which is quoted in a history column by C.B. Berry. Pilmoor describes a harrowing experience forging Singleton Swash:

I took leave of my hospitable friend and went on toward Long Bay…As the tide just suited, I pushed along in hopes of reaching the ford at the eastern end of it before the flowing of the tide, but was too late. There was no house on the beach; to return 15 miles over the bay was very discouraging; to stay all night upon the shore, without anyone to speak to, very disagreeable and to ford the water very dangerous. However, I ventured in but had not gone far before I was at a full stop. The spring-tide came in very rapidly, the waves rolled against the sides of the horse and presently flowed over his back. In this situation, I did not know what I must do…In my distress I lifted up my heart unto God and cried to him for deliverance and immediately it was impressed upon my mind as distinctly as if I had heard a voice saying to me, Jump down into the water—go along by the side of the horse—take hold of the reins—wade through the water and pull the horse after you. I plunged into the sea immediately and soon found the horse had got into quicksand; the water did not reach up to my breast…I drew him along and escaped safe to the shore. This was one of the most remarkable deliverances of my life. After I had traveled about a mile through the wood, I found a little cottage belonging to a French refugee where I was glad to take up my abode for the night.

In those days, a twenty-mile span on the beach was a bypass of Old Kings Highway because traveling on hard-packed beach sand was easier to traverse than the highway’s soft sand. The bypass ran from Murrells Inlet in the south to Singleton Swash at the north, and from those points, travelers picked up Old Kings Highway again or headed west.

The Old Kings Highway, a former Native American trail that became a major colonial American north–south route was the last part of the road between Boston and Savannah to be served by stagecoach,