The Boardwalk, the SkyWheel, and How a Timber Town Became the Grand Strand

You are standing on the Myrtle Beach Boardwalk, and just up the sand the SkyWheel turns almost two hundred feet above the Atlantic. But this whole place, this sixty mile arc of shore they call the Grand Strand, began not as a resort but as a stand of pine and wax myrtle owned by a timber company. In the eighteen eighties, the Burroughs and Collins Company of Conway bought up much of this coast.

To haul cypress and pine out to market, they chartered the Conway and Seashore Railroad, and in the spring of nineteen hundred, wood burning locomotives began running out to the ocean. When it came time to name the growing settlement, then simply called New Town, the company held a contest. Franklin Burroughs had died before the town he imagined took shape, but his widow suggested honoring the shrub that grew thick along these dunes, the southern wax myrtle.

And so, Myrtle Beach. In nineteen twelve, a Chicago financier named Simeon Chapin joined the Burroughs sons to form the Myrtle Beach Farms Company. Chapin brought money and business polish, the Burroughs family brought enormous landholdings, and together they steered the whole region into decades of growth.

That company, later known as Burroughs and Chapin, would build much of what visitors still recognize. For most of the twentieth century, families came for the same simple things, the wide flat beach, cheap cottages, and the amusement park at the Pavilion. Then, in the two thousands, the city reinvented its front porch.

The Boardwalk and Promenade opened in twenty ten, running about one and a quarter miles between Second Avenue North and Fourteenth Avenue North, and the following May the SkyWheel rose beside it. At the time it was the tallest observation wheel in the country east of the Mississippi River. From the top of it, on a clear day, you can see the shape of the whole thing at once, the pier, the high rise towers, the beach curving north and south, a coast that was pine forest within living memory and now draws close to twenty million visitors a year.

The wax myrtle is still out there in the dunes, quietly holding the name.