The Grand Strand Today, Twenty Million Strong

Step back and take in the whole thing. The Grand Strand runs some sixty miles, from Little River near the North Carolina line all the way down past Georgetown, an almost unbroken beach of fine pale sand. Along it now stretch a wall of high rise resorts, roughly one hundred golf courses, dinner theaters, wax museums, water parks, seafood buffets, and a permanent population that has exploded, making the Myrtle Beach area one of the fastest growing places in the entire country.

Close to twenty million visitors come each year. It is easy to roll your eyes at all the neon and mini golf, but consider what this actually is. In the space of about a century, a company town cut from pine forest became one of the most popular vacation coasts in America, built deliberately for ordinary families rather than the rich.

Underneath the towers and the arcades runs the deeper current, the Waccamaw and the Chicora who were here first, the enslaved rice workers whose descendants became the Gullah Geechee, the Black families who built their own beach when they were shut out of this one, and the storms that kept forcing this coast to rebuild itself bigger. The Grand Strand is a young place wearing a very old story. Welcome to it.