The Grand Strand and the Pavilion That Started It All

Myrtle Beach was not always Myrtle Beach. Before the name, before the boardwalk, before the 100,000-person weeks of summer, there was a lumber company, a railroad, and a pavilion. The Burroughs and Collins Company owned most of the timberland in Horry County, and in the early 1900s they built a railroad to move lumber from the interior to the coast — and then realized that the coast itself, with its wide beaches and warm Gulf Stream water, might be more valuable than the trees.

The first Myrtle Beach Pavilion was built in 1908 as a bathhouse and dance hall, and it became the anchor of a resort that would grow from a handful of beach cottages into the Grand Strand — sixty miles of continuous beachfront that is now the second-most-visited destination on the East Coast. The Pavilion was rebuilt, expanded, and beloved through multiple incarnations until its demolition in 2006, and its absence is still felt by the locals who grew up with the shag dancing that the Pavilion floor made famous.

The Carolina Shag — not the Austin Powers kind — is a smooth, cool, partner dance that developed on the Grand Strand in the 1940s when Black and white teenagers danced to R&B music at the beach pavilions of Ocean Drive (now North Myrtle Beach). The dance is the official state dance of South Carolina, and Fat Harold's Beach Club in North Myrtle Beach is where it still lives — a dance floor, a jukebox, and couples who have been shagging (the dance) since the Eisenhower administration and can still make it look effortless.

The Grand Strand's history is the history of American beach culture: a place that was invented by a railroad, shaped by a dance, and sustained by the democratic conviction that a week at the beach is not a luxury but a right. The Pavilion is gone, but the shag endures, and on a summer night at Fat Harold's, with the music playing and the couples gliding across the floor, Myrtle Beach remembers what it was before it became what it is.