Myrtle Beach

There was no town here until 1900. The land behind the beach belonged to the Burroughs & Collins timber company of Conway, which built a railway to the coast to carry timber, opened in 1900; the end of the line was nicknamed New Town. In a naming contest Franklin Burroughs's widow suggested Myrtle Beach, after the southern wax myrtle that grows locally, and in 1901 his sons opened the Seaside Inn, the first inn.

Growth was slow until the roads came. Kings Highway was paved in 1940, and a succession of pavilions became the places where crowds danced through summer nights. The town was incorporated in 1938, and an air force base south of town, opened for the Second World War, brought a permanent population. Hurricane Hazel, the worst in the city's history, struck in 1954, and the beachfront was rebuilt as the Grand Strand grew into a mass-market resort. The Carolina shag was danced to rhythm and blues in the beach clubs along the way.

Myrtle Beach became a city in 1957. The decades since have brought the golf boom, the dinner theatres and amusement parks of the 1980s and 1990s, Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the closure of the air base in 1993 and its rebuilding as the Market Common, the closure of the old Pavilion in 2006 after 58 years, and the opening of the Boardwalk in 2010 and the SkyWheel in 2011. The region is now one of the fastest-growing in the country.

Myrtle Beach is a people's resort, closer in spirit to Blackpool or the Jersey Shore than to the quiet gated islands further down the coast. Its culture is the summer culture of the Boardwalk and Ocean Boulevard — arcades, airbrushed T-shirts, beach-music bars, pancake breakfasts — and the family entertainment industry built around it: dinner theatres with pirate shows, a country-music variety show that has run for about forty years, wax museums, mini-golf courses by the dozen and a minor-league ball club.

The one art form it can claim as its own is the Carolina shag, the smooth partner dance whose name is thought to have originated at Cherry Grove Beach in the 1940s, danced in the bars and pavilions of the Carolina beaches to the rhythm and blues that became known as beach music. It is the official state dance of South Carolina, and each spring dancers gather in the Ocean Drive section of North Myrtle Beach for the Society of Stranders' gathering. Golf is the other religion: the Grand Strand has about ninety courses and has been called the golf capital of the world, and golfers from the North and from Canada fill the hotels in the shoulder seasons.

The city's visitors have always been working- and middle-class families from the Carolinas, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Ontario, and motorcyclists in May. Manners are friendly and informal, and the city's year-round residents — many of them retirees from the North — take some pride in living in a place the rest of the country thinks of as a holiday.

About 35,000 people live inside the city limits, but the wider Myrtle Beach–Conway area had an estimated 479,000 people in 2024 and is among the fastest-growing in the United States, with more than 104,000 people moving in over eight years. The economy is tourism, with more than 20 million visitors a year, plus golf, real estate and the construction that serves them. Coastal Carolina University in Conway adds a student population, and the airport, the hospitals and Horry County government supply the steadier jobs.

Work is seasonal for many. Hotels, restaurants and attractions hire in spring and lay off in autumn; wages are low and housing near the beach is expensive, so many workers live inland and commute along crowded main roads. The residents live in neighbourhoods behind the strip — the Market Common's new streets, the older bungalows around the city centre, and the golf-course subdivisions to the north and west.

Daily rhythm is the visitors' rhythm: breakfast queues at the pancake houses, beach by mid-morning, attractions in the afternoon heat, buffets and shows at night. Winter is the locals' season, when the beach is empty, the golf courses are full of Canadians and the city catches its breath. The long-running local issues are traffic, the behaviour of late-night crowds on Ocean Boulevard, erosion and the regular renourishment of the beach, and the question of how much more the Strand can build.

The dish that defines the Grand Strand is fried seafood in the Calabash style, named after the town of Calabash, about 25 miles away in North Carolina, which has been known for its style of fried fish since the 1930s. Calabash-style buffets are common in the coastal towns of the eastern Carolinas, and Myrtle Beach has a large number of these restaurants, where fried fish and shellfish are served in generous portions.

The local inland dish is chicken bog, Horry County's one-pot meal of chicken, smoked sausage, rice and onion cooked together until the rice is soft — a pilaf that is most popular in Horry County and has its own festival, the Loris Bog-Off. Lowcountry food reaches up the coast from Charleston: shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, oyster roasts in the cooler months and Lowcountry boil. Murrells Inlet, a former fishing village about 16 miles south, is known for its seafood restaurants and its half-mile boardwalk over the salt marsh.

Breakfast is a genre of its own, with pancake and waffle houses serving stacks with country ham, sausage gravy and grits to the holiday crowds. Barbecue comes in the South Carolina mustard-sauce style as well as the vinegar style of the eastern Carolinas, and peaches, boiled peanuts and watermelon are sold at stands along the inland roads in summer.