Was Myrtle Beach Ruined, or Was It Built to Sell?

"Myrtle Beach in February," said the Skeptic. "Isn't that the place they paved over?"

"It was a sales pitch before it was ever a town," I said, a little too proudly, like a fellow who has just found the receipt.

Stand on the sand at Myrtle Beach and the Atlantic is in front of you, Ocean Boulevard is at your back, and the Grand Strand runs off both ways. Somewhere behind all of it, inland, the old rail line ran back to Conway in Horry County.

That rail line is the whole origin story. The South Carolina Encyclopedia lays it out: before the twentieth century this was thin country, a few small farms and, for a first settlement, a logging camp. Around 1900 a Conway outfit, the Burroughs & Collins Company, laid track to the coast to get its timber out. The end of the line went by the name New Town.

Then, in 1901, the company went into the vacation business. It put up a small hotel, the Seaside Inn, at two dollars a day with meals thrown in, opened a general store, and put oceanfront lots on the market at twenty-five dollars apiece. Some village.

(The town picked up a new name along the way, from the wax myrtle, a modest shrub that grows all over the region. I like to think somebody asked the shrub first. I have no evidence of this.)

Horry County folk took the train down and stayed a day, a week or the whole season. Then the Woodside family of Greenville came along in the 1920s wanting something exclusive, and built the Ocean Forest Hotel and the Pine Lakes golf course. Both were done in time to greet the Great Depression. The Woodsides defaulted.

"Rotten luck for the Ocean Forest," I said.

"You say that like you'd have seen the Depression coming," said the Skeptic. "You can't see Tuesday coming."

Fair enough. In the late 1930s new bridges let the automobile in, and the trade turned from exclusive guests to middle-class folks driving down in their own cars.