Horry County

In the late 1940s Myrtle Beach began a period of sustained growth as fun-seeking Americans discovered the South Carolina resort. Hurricane Hazel temporarily stalled the postwar boom in 1954, but the lower land prices that resulted created an opportunity to combine small holdings into commercial-sized parcels. Soon, national hotel and restaurant chains acquired properties in Myrtle Beach.

Myrtle Beach AFB became part of Tactical Air Command, with F-100 Super Saber fighters and an estimated 3,500 military and civilian personnel. During the following two decades, aircraft from Myrtle Beach AFB saw extensive action in Indochina and other theaters.

The original pavilion was a wooden structure that adjoined the Seaside Inn, Myrtle Beach’s first hotel, built in 1901. It was used principally for dances during the summer season.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers from western Horry County came by covered wagon to fish and enjoy the beach. They camped behind the dunes, cooked their catch over open fires, and salted barrels of spots and mullets to take home. It was at once work and recreation for these hearty folk.

The hotel, standing twenty-nine feet above sea level, with a ten-story wedding-cake tower flanked by two five-story wings, was South Carolina’s Statue of Liberty.

From about 1898 to 1926 Perry ran the Elhanan orphanage and school for poor children in Marion, North Carolina.

Prince Frederick’s Parish stretched like an elongated triangle from the Santee River northward “to the utmost bounds of the Province,” encompassing all or part of modern Dillon, Marion, Florence, Horry, Georgetown, and Williamsburg Counties.

The perfection of tidal culture in the late eighteenth century transformed Georgetown and its environs into the principal rice-producing area in the United States, with African slaves approaching ninety percent of the population of Prince George Winyah by 1810.

There was often disagreement in a county about whether to set up or keep rural police. From its start in the 1900s, nearly to Home Rule in the early 1970s, rural police remained part of the law for select counties.

Called “jitterbugs” for the jazz-based acrobatic dance they performed along the Carolina coast, the white dancers found that the emerging “race” music (soon to be renamed “rhythm and blues”) slowed and smoothed their movements.

Sheriffs are well-known and prominent public officials and law enforcement officers. Constables tend to be somewhat obscure in the public’s awareness. But whether sheriffs or constables, these officers have been steadfastly providing law enforcement services since the colonial period.

Novelist, short story writer. Nicknamed “Mickey” by his Irish Catholic father, Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March…

An internationally known brothel, the Sunset Lodge, founded about 1936, was located in a white frame house adorned by neon…

(Horry County; 2020 pop. 4,580). This popular resort town lies south of Myrtle Beach along South Carolina’s Grand Strand. The…

Three times in the history of South Carolina, tobacco has risen to the status of a major cash crop, and…

Truck farming is the production of annual fruit and vegetable crops to be sold fresh. Truck farming began after the…

Often described as the most unusual plant on earth, the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula Ellis) is a terrestrial insectivorous (bug-eating) plant native to a small section of South Carolina and North Carolina within an approximately one-hundred-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina.

Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) was established on December 1, 1997, to protect and manage diverse habitat components within an important coastal river ecosystem.

The Waccamaw River, named for the Waccamaw nation of Native Americans, begins at Lake Waccamaw in North Carolina. The river…