How The Beach Became Itself

Myrtle Beach is a boom town, 

And it always has been.  

Since my grandfather’s time,

What changes is the source 

Of economic thunder,

What keeps Myrtle Beach booming,  

The definition of the gold, 

That everybody rushes to the Beach 

To get a piece of. 

In my grandfather’s day, 

The gold was turpentine, the naval stores industry. 

Turpentine and pine tar 

Refined from the amber sap of pinus palusnrus, 

Long Leaf Yellow Pine.

Where Myrtle Beach is today, 

Once grew a forest of gigantic long leaf trees.  

From Little River to Winyah Bay, 

For sixty miles along the coast, 

Standing tall as ten story condominiums, 

Big around as six grown men could reach 

Stretching to touch each other’s fingertips, possibly 

The only old growth pine forest 

Surviving east of the Mississippi River, 

Yellow pine giants, never cut.

My grandfather came here to build a turpentine camp

In 1887, thereabouts.  He was nineteen years old,

The designated bossman, James E. Bryan, Mr. Jim and Big Jim,

Depending on the business at hand.  

He was under the direction of Burroughs and Collins Company, 

Hand picked for the job by F. G. Burroughs, founder of B&C

The big bossman of turpentine.  

Granddaddy’s crew, 

Hand picked by him, 

Were primarily former slaves, emancipated in early childhood 

From rice plantations along tidal rivers in Georgetown County.  

The majority spoke no English at all.  

Granddaddy spoke their language. 

Many of the crew had been his playmates 

Growing up in The Gully, the Black ghetto of Conway, 

That came about mostly after the Civil War.  

My grandfather lived there

Because his mother, Prudence Amanda Bryan, my great grandmama, 

Was exiled to The Gully 

For giving birth out of wedlock to Granddaddy.  

In those days, being a bastard child was almost as low 

Being born with black skin.  My grandfather got no formal schooling.  

His mother taught him to read, write and practice good penmanship. 

He had beautiful handwriting, 

And he was very quick with numbers.  

He went to work in turpentine when he was seven or eight years old.   

The big bossman, F. G. Burroughs, discovered him.  

Around ten years later, Granddaddy was chosen to lead an expedition 

Of pioneers, for to open new territory to naval stores, 

Pine tar and turpentine, as aforesaid, 

Some seventy-thousand acres of long leaf, old growth forest,

Surely an epic undertaking for a nineteen year old man.

Now in those days, between Conway and the gigantic trees 

Existed Impassable Swamp.  

Which was a Carolina Bay, 

That is, a shallow depression in the earth 

Probably gouged out by an ancient meteor.  

The heat of the meteor striking the soil, mostly beach sand, 

Transformed the soil to glass. 

Rainwater, draining to the bottom of the crater, 

Never got out.  

The vegetation of a Carolina Bay 

Grew so thick and tangled 

As to qualify impassable for humans, wagons, and beasts of burden.  

The Carolina bay between Conway and the beach 

Measured some thirty miles long and twelve miles wide, 

Largest of all the Carolina Bays in The Independent Republic of Horry,  

With no road across it, through it, or any way possible.  

To get from downtown Conway to where I’m standing 

Without at least a two day journey by mule wagon.

Faster for a man on horse, no doubt,

Nonetheless the principal reason 

why the gigantic pine trees still stood, 

which were the gold, 

waiting to be excavated by Granddaddy, 

As raw pine sap. 

The first noise of economic thunder that boomed, 

Beyond Impassable Swamp. 

Granddaddy and his crew came to build a turpentine camp. 

Then a village and a town.  

And they called it New Town because it was.

Imagine the builders, 

The pioneers, 

A couple of hundred former slaves, 

Given Granddaddy to lead them,

a very young White man, 

Outcast as they were,

Chosen by him, all volunteers. 

The chosen few, 

The disillusionment of Emancipation 

Behind them, 

Dashed hope of Reconstruction disregarded, 

The broken promise of forty acres and a mule forgot. 

The refuge of Impassable Swamp

Negating even fear of the Ku Klux Klan.

Imagine their hope and drive, 

Hear the work songs 

Sung in collective enterprise.

They trusted Granddaddy,

Side by side,

Hunted and fished, 

Grew their own food, 

And built New Town together.  

Tragically the ideal did not endure long, 

But it started that way.  

And how things begin, sometimes, somehow, 

Gets absorbed,

Perpetuated by the soul of geography.

I maintain that possibility exits,  

Based on longevity of prosperity, 

The endless lucky streak of Myrtle Beach,

Inexplicable by reason, 

Magical even,

Going back to the legend 

Of The Flying Place,

Before The Independent Republic of Horry was.

Among 18,000 slaves of the rice plantations,

The religion of the root, 

That amalgamation of African animism

And the mysteries of Jesus,

Otherwise and elsewhere called VooDoo.

The Almighty Root of the Lord

Supplied the faithful 

With hope

Of transformation, 

Freedom and escape

Transcendant.

If a man but slipped his chains,

And ran,

Not north, toward the Drinking Gourd,

But east, to the rising sun.

Outrunning the dogs,

Finding the ocean,

Who stood at dawn 

And raised arms to the motherland of all, 

Black and White,

Seeing the sun levitate from the big water,

Into the sky,

Even a slave in chains

Would grow wings and fly.

That faith in levitation,

That hope of escape

A sensation of freedom

A lightening of spirit

A willingness to fly from worry 

Is retained,

In the atmosphere

All along a sixty mile stretch of white sand,

The Flying Place

That is the Beach. 

When turpentine was golden 

In 1893, came a hurricane,

Nameless to the living, 

Without warning,

Killing thousands

From St. Helena Island

To the coast of Maine.

Some unknown number 

Of my grandfather’s people

Were drown, swept away.

The wind came gradually,

As hurricanes do, 

Increasing by the hour, a force Biblical

By today’s measure, Force 5,

Most likely.

The wind, impossible to stand against,

And then the wave,

The surge,

The ocean coming as a wall,

An invasion,

Crashing through the old growth pine,

Loosening the roots.

The eye of the storm passed

And again the wind came,

Suddenly now, from the opposite direction, 

A Biblical REAPER’S BLADE,

Cutting the forest all to pieces.    

Robbing New Town of its gold.

Doubtless robbing Granddaddy of hope,

Seeing the trees blown down,

Loosing so many people,

With all they had built of New Town, 

Vanished, 

Simply gone.

I shouldn’t wonder

If Granddaddy developed a nervous condition,

What was medically known,

 After the Civil War, 

As veteran’s nostalgia.

The syndrome awakened memories

Of terrifying events, so vividly imagined 

By the suffering party, 

That bygone horror reappeared as current reality.

In Granddaddy’s case 

The hurricane.

For several years afterward

He could not sleep within hearing range

Of the Atlantic breakwater.

On a calm night near the ocean,

What other people heard 

As the lullaby of the surf washing onto the sand,

Granddaddy apprehended as thirty-five-foot rollers

Attacking the long leaf pines.

The Surge dragging terrified people down

From where they had climbed up

And tied themselves off for survival

In splintering cedar trees and live oaks.

Carried away without a trace.

Granddaddy woke up screaming, could not sleep.

At various degrees of intensity, 

The affliction stayed with him the rest of his life.

Like the cannons at Cickamauga

And the prison camp at Rock Island, Illinois

Surely lived on in the mind’s eye of F. G. Burroughs.

Granddaddy’s mentor and protector 

Must have recognized the symptoms

Of that dreadfully misnamed syndrome:

The nostalgia,

As if the sufferer 

Wished to be returned to the horror,

In order to experience afresh

The vain glory of improbable survival.

The big bossman 

Afforded Granddaddy the relief

Of redirecting him to south central Georgia,

Where he spent several years recovering his nerve,

In a turpentine camp,

Blessedly removed from the Atlantic’s 

Nightmare lullaby,

For reasons obscure and by connections unclear,

For F. G. Burroughs died in 1897. 

Granddaddy 

Returned to Horry County as a school teacher,

Sanctioned and paid 

By the Bucksport, Buckville ship building

And sawmill communities,

Virtually owned by the Buck family,

Which employed Granddaddy 

As a tutor for young children of the house,

And Mr. Buck

Tutored Granddaddy in the methods 

Of operating a steam driven sawmill.  

Meanwhile as ever,

Under direction of Burroughs and Collins, 

The industry of New Town

Shifted from refinement of naval stores to milled lumber.

Long leaf pine, much in demand for shipbuilding

In Bucksport, Maine, 

Where the Buck family originated.

By easy stages, the Burroughs and Collins 

Gradually brought Granddaddy home,

Back to New Town.

Of course nothing was as it had been.

The hurricane had conveniently harvested

In a few hours, a forest

That would have taken timber fallers,

With axes and crosscut saws,

Years to bring to the millworks.

The market value of turpentine and pine tar

Had been tending downward for a long time.

Wooden ships,

What had made naval stores

The crude oil of the Age of Sail,

Were obsolete, 

Giving way to steal hull construction

And Steam driven engines.

Granddaddy had been

The rising star 

Of a dying industry.

Many of his original crew 

Had been hurricane victims.

The survivors of that singular ordeal

Of course were vested in legend.

The next ordeal, mandated by Burroughs and Collins,   

Would blow open the doors to the future of New Town. 

That is, cut through the tangle of Impassable Swamp,

And lay a railroad track, from the sawmill 

To Conway,

For to carry pine lumber to market.

Granddaddy and the other hurricane survivors

Joined five hundred Black men 

Armed with bush axes, shovels, hoes, and picks

And all together, commenced the assault.

Within a year, 

The economic thunder of the train

Rumbled from New Town to the river.

As yet there was no bridge across the Waccamaw River

And wouldn’t be for decades.

To land in Conway proper,

Shallow draft barges ferried lumber one way

And all else needed to sustain New Town

Went back the other.

Never did the train carry sight seers,

Nor anyone traveling merely for fun,

Not even out of simple curiosity,

 to view the ocean.

Many living in Conway never had.  

In New Town

The future was about to appear,

Mysterious in the moment,

Coincidental, like the voice of God,

One morning a dead whale was discovered

Washed up on the beach.

The first tourist attraction of New Town.

As fate determined the new identity of gold.

The next economic thunder to rumble.

No one yet recognized the ocean itself, 

As other than a monster sleeping,

Not to be disturbed 

By the human sentiment for beauty and awe of the magnificent.

Leave alone the magic of The Flying Place,

Nobody had grown wings on the day of the storm,

The survivors had not flown 

Beyond reach 

Of deadly wind and deadlier wave.

Granddaddy and all just got lucky.

And the whale 

Awakened many hurricane survivors

To dreadful signs and omens.

However, to Granddaddy’s eye, 

The eighty foot leviathan

Was a dead ringer 

For the Biblical whale that swallowed Jonah.

Perhaps a vision of gold appeared to Granddaddy,

Perhaps not.

The general mood in New Town 

Leaned toward climbing trees 

And waiting to see 

If the giant dead fish 

Portended another hurricane and tidal wave.

Granddaddy dispatched a rider 

With a beautiful handwritten missive

For the home office.

The messenger,

Mounted on the fastest horse in New Town

Raced alongside the new railroad spur, 

Flat out,

Up a straightaway as true as a tight wire,

All the way across what had been The Impassable Swamp.

Word reached Burroughs and Collins 

Well before the noon,

That a great fish 

Such as Bibles of the day illuminated

In wondrous color and terrifying detail 

Was on the beach

In New Town.

Granddaddy offered the practical aside, 

That the fish was fresh

And might be butchered for meat, if no time were lost.

If the train were sent forthwith,

A windfall of seafood, several tons, 

Might be hauled off to market.

Surely Granddaddy was aware of it being Wednesday,

That in Conway, all business and gainful employment

Ceased at noon on second Sabbath of Wednesday.

The population would retire for lunch, take a long nap,

And awaken for spiritual nourishment that evening 

At prayer meetings of all the denominations.

Perhaps Granddaddy 

Had given the messenger orders 

To spread the word,

That something of Biblical significance 

Was available to witness in New Town. 

Anyway, doubtless

Conway crackled with rumors 

Signs and wonders, 

Curiosity pervaded.

A civic congregation, 

Gathered at the company’s home office,

Requesting confirmation, 

As by now,

Rumor knew it for a fact;

In New Town, 

Jonah’s reveal 

From the belly of the whale 

Was at hand.

The Company invited the whole congregation

To take off all day,

And ride the train free of charge.

Thence to witness the Lord’s word 

Made manifest.

He gave the messenger a fresh horse,

And sent Granddaddy message if return.

This was The Day of Whale.

Granddaddy had every mule team and wagon 

Hitched up and taken to the railhead.

Two thirds of the chickens in New Town 

He had slaughtered and fried.

The train came pulling flat cars

As usual, no rolling stock for passengers.

The flatcars for hauling lumber and freight

Were lined with makeshift benches, 

Fashioned of railroad ties and rough sawn pine.

The entire population of Conway, as much of it

As fitted on the flat cars,

Raised their umbrellas 

To keep from being burned 

By flying cinders, 

Belched from the smokestack

Of the locomotive,

The Black Mirah.

On the Day of the Whale,

The first solid gold tourists

To disembark the train

Touched down

In New Town.

All of this, or most of it, actually happened.

Granddaddy charged a penny 

To ride the wagons to see the whale.

No discount for children.

And sold for a nickel a chunk of fried chicken

And a boiled sweet potato.  

Now the whale, the rumored Leviathan of Jonah,

In addition to being dead,

Suffered as all tourist attractions do,

From inflated expectations.

Plus a mere eighty foot fish

Lying on a sixty mile stretch 

Of white sand beach,

 In full view of the Atlantic Ocean,

Was barely a speck,

But a minuscule blemish 

Upon a panorama of air, and light, and white sand, 

And blue water, 

Endless, 

Beneath the blue dome of the sky.

Many swamp dwellers 

From beyond the river

Had never known a sea breeze 

To cool the sweated brow.

An afternoon trade wind fumigated the air

Driving away mosquitoes and yellow flies.

Nobody wanted to go home.

Before the sad return to the railhead

Well before the wagons loaded,

Granddaddy was approached numerous times,

By leading citizens of Conway,

Inquiring 

Was it even possible 

To purchase a plot of sand

Just enough to build a small summer home.

And so it was

The Big Bossman 

And Granddaddy

Indeed struck gold

On the Day of the Whale. 

Real Estate was big money thunder.

While the underlying mother lode,

Seemingly,

Was Big Blue,

The Southern Atlantic Ocean

 Why everybody came to the Beach

The answer was more than just the sand.

The big water

And the beach together,

Made the real estate shine.

That seems obvious to us now.

But in Granddaddy’s time

Ordinary people 

Hadn’t started taking vacations

The way they took off

After World War II.

Going for vacation in Granddaddy’s world

Was for the rich only.

And there weren’t many rich anymore

In the defeated states of the old Confederacy.

Never had been many for that matter.

Granddaddy never took vacation

That I know of,

Except to honeymoon in New York City.

Otherwise,

The grindstone

And Granddaddy’s nose

Were constant companions,

From dawn to dark

He and Grandmama Amo

Did manage to conceive seven children.

All of whom lived full lives,

And died after more years

Than Granddaddy survived,

Who all of his life 

Was a chain smoker of hand-rolled cigarettes.    

In Granddaddy’s time

The carnival came to town and never left.  

In my father’s day, 

The rainmaker was golf

And the golf travel industry

That Myrtle Beach invented

Nationwide, beginning with The Dunes Golf and Beach Club, 

That fertilized well over a hundred public golf courses,

In our lifetime.

It almost doesn’t seem possible

The lucky streak of Myrtle Beach.

Lately, it has come to light that a geodetic anomaly,

Something having to do 

With a sixty mile stretch 

Of white sand beach,

Wherein,

As it were, the digital Flying Place 

Of sub-sea super computer trunk lines

Grow wings 

Rising out of sea,  

Conveying digital tidal waves of data, 

More safely, more efficiently, for some reason, 

than almost any other place 

On the East Coast of North America.  

A brand new, seven trillion dollar a year industry,

Lifting My Girl Myrtle

On new-grown wings.

Perhaps  

Myrtle Beach is always New Town,  

The Flying Place imagined,

The hope of freedom’s drive.

I recently asked Egerton Burroughs

The prince of the city,

The patriarch of modern Myrtle Beach,

What has been the crucial ingredient

Of the gold 

That Myrtle Beach keeps striking,

For example, Sports tourism,

Softball tournaments and volley ball,

Cheerleader contests that draw thousands,

The Beach Ball Classic basketball phenomenon,

The World’s Strongest Man Competition,

The big time Country Music Festival

The Myrtle Beach Classic PGA Golf Tournament,

The list of rainmakers goes on and on 

And keeps growing,

Why is that, I asked?

The patriarch said,

Family,

All inclusive,

We cater to families,

And always have.

And you knew it for true.

Generation upon generation,

Family is the gold of our prosperity.

Why parents bring children to the Beach 

On vacation

And leave the kids home 

To go to Miami.

Family is golden at the Beach.

Why casino developers have failed

Time and again.

Why city government

And business leaders

Made decisions to sacrifice 

Tens of millions in revenue

To slow down the bikers,

Demanding our community 

Be protected,

The priority of the Golden Rule

Re-established,

Civic self-respect 

Restored. 

Albeit at a cost

Still difficult to swallow.

(Pause)

Love 

Is the key ingredient

That holds a family together.

In Myrtle Beach 

Family is

The philosoper's stone, 

The crucial ingredient 

That creates the gold.

At the Beach, 

Therefore,

The economic thunder 

Of the future we share 

Is love.