Murrells Inlet
While local people caught fish and gathered shellfish for their own tables, the only seafood products that could be shipped from the future “Seafood Capital” were salted mullet, clams, and diamondback terrapin.
(Georgetown County; 2020 pop. 9,137). Located twenty-two miles up the Waccamaw Neck from Georgetown, Murrells Inlet first appeared on maps from the early 1800s as either Murray’s Inlet or Morrall’s, the latter after John Morrall, who purchased 610 acres on the inlet in 1731. By the mid-1800s rice plantations were operating all along the Waccamaw Neck. A handful of planters owned personal “swaths” of the inlet, each having his own “creek boy,” a slave whose job was working the inlet for oysters, clams, crabs, shrimp, and fish. During the Civil War, Murrells Inlet became a small port for Confederate forces, and blockade-runners stopped there for supplies such as salt, produced by seawater evaporation in large pans along the shore.
By the close of the nineteenth century, people from inland South Carolina towns, particularly Marion, began to establish a summer colony along the inlet creekfront. The area remained, for the most part, a farming community. While local people caught fish and gathered shellfish for their own tables, the only seafood products that could be shipped from the future “Seafood Capital” were salted mullet, clams, and diamondback terrapin.
If the inlet’s seafood could not be shipped out, then people would have to go there to get it; and throughout the twentieth century they did just that. At first they came to down-home, hole-in-the-table oyster roasts and fried shore dinners put on by Murrells Inlet’s “founding families”: the Morse, Nance, Vereen, Oliver, Chandler, and Lee families. The food was fried and the atmosphere friendly, and the area’s popularity grew. A growing fleet of charter and party boats arose, with inlet captains taking visiting anglers offshore. During World War II, captains ran boats for the Crash Boat Station, recovering the bodies of flyers lost in aerial gunnery practice over the area.
After the war, prosperity made Murrells Inlet more accessible, and local seafood restaurants benefited from their close proximity to Myrtle Beach. The salad days lasted until September 1989, when Hurricane Hugo gave the creekfront a new look overnight. As it had before, the community rebounded. Despite a sixty-six percent increase in local population during the 1990s, commercial development, and economic competition, the community held on to its history and heritage–and to its reputation as a great place to visit, a great place to eat, and a great place to live.
Gasque, Pratt. Rum Gully Tales from Tuck’em Inn: Stories of Murrells Inlet and the Waccamaw Country. Orangeburg, S.C.: Sandlapper, 1990.
Peterkin, Genevieve. Heaven Is a Beautiful Place: A Memoir of the South Carolina Coast. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
Rogers, George C. History of Georgetown County, South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970.
