In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene uncovers why Myrtle Beach is so much more than a family vacation spot. She takes a historic trolley tour, dips into strip malls to taste its diverse food scene, escapes the crowds to retreat into the greenery and visits the Gullah Geechee Seafood Trail, where travel is harnessed for communal uplift.
Transcript
Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks one tricky topic in travel each week. And this week, as part of our Unpacking series, I’m traveling to the sandy paradise that is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Aislyn: I am dancing with a doorknob.
OK, I’m not really dancing with a doorknob. But I could dance with a doorknob. I’m in the back room of a bar called Fat Harold’s Beach Club.
In the main area, a DJ is playing that song you just heard, “I Love Beach Music” by the Embers and a woman named Mandy Holt is teaching a roomful of people how to dance the shag. If you don’t know—and I didn’t know, before tonight—the shag is South Carolina’s state dance.
And here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, this is where the shag was born nearly a century ago, right near the sandy beach that’s, maybe, three minutes from where I’m standing.
The shag is like a slowed down version of the jitterbug. And while the new dancers twist and shimmy, I look at photos and plaques that commemorate decades of the dance. On the far wall is a row of vintage-looking doorknobs, located at about hip height. And that’s because the shag has a very small footprint on the dance floor—if you look at videos on YouTube, you’ll see that you really don’t move around much. And back at the height of shag mania in the 1940s and ’50s, if you didn’t have a partner, you’d hold onto one of these doorknobs and practice your moves.
It’s just another layer that I’m peeling back in this place, which has the prettiest beach I’ve seen in years. But as this room and the dancers outside of it are proving, Myrtle Beach is much more than its sandy shores.
Of course, the beach is what draws people here. And it is a stunner. Picture white sand, warm, swimmable waves stretching for miles. A pretty boardwalk capped with a Ferris wheel that lights up at night. Coming from Northern California, where I live, and Washington State, where I grew up, the beach is a revelation.
The Atlantic Ocean isn’t frigid—at least not on this warm June day. The sand is wide and inviting and soft, an easy stroll from the many hotels that line the beach. And there’s just so much of it. Geographically speaking however, this area is more complex than I first thought. Because people often say “Myrtle Beach” when they’re really referring to something much larger.
Stuart Butler: So we collectively refer to it as the Grand Strand. We’re actually 14 communities that go from the North Carolina border all the way down to Georgetown County and it’s 60 miles of wide-open beaches.
Aislyn: That’s Stuart Butler, the chief marketing officer for Visit Myrtle Beach. We’re chatting in the Visit Myrtle Beach tourism office, where you can see that Ferris wheel, called the SkyWheel, from the parking lot. As you just heard, Stuart is British. And he moved to Myrtle Beach, the city, in 2001.
Stuart: February 12th of next year will be my halfway point where I’m, I’m half English and half American so . . .
Aislyn: Stuart loves living here and he loves his job. He also represents something really cool about the city: its diversity and its relative newness. The city of Myrtle Beach came into being on March 12th,1938. And it has a pretty glamorous origin story.
Stuart: It was about the halfway point between New York and Miami. So rich and famous people would travel up and down the coast and they would need somewhere to stop because that wasn’t a one-day trip back in the day. And so they’d stop around this area. And eventually we created what was called the first million-dollar hotel, the Ocean Forest Hotel, which is rich with history of who stayed there.
Aislyn: Sadly, the Ocean Forest Hotel was demolished back in 1974. But there’s still a lot of cool celebrity history—more on that soon. Stuart says that because Myrtle Beach is such a young city, a lot of people, like himself, aren’t from here originally.
Stuart: I mean, we do have people who are third, fourth generation. But the vast majority of our population, 80 plus percent, have lived here fewer than 20 years. So we’ve become this place, which is a melting pot of people from all cultures, all walks of life.
Aislyn: After I leave Stuart, I walk to the Myrtle Beach boardwalk. It’s a little over a mile long and lets you take in so much of what makes the city unique. There’s the beach, doing its beachy thing. Piers that jut out into the lapping waves. There are beachfront stores—I stop in and get some salt water taffy, which is a beach weakness of mine.
Many of the stores look like they’re straight out of the ’50s, and I see hotels with a midcentury vibe. And then there’s the SkyWheel, this 187-foot tall Ferris wheel with glassed-in cars that provide epic views of the city and sea. This area is the nerve center of Myrtle Beach. It’s also where you can quite literally see the city’s past and present meet. I wanted to know more about that, so the next day I leave the comfort of the sand for a dive into history.
Kathryn Hedgepath: Good morning, everyone. We’re going to find a sweet spot in just a sec. There it is. And I welcome you to the Myrtle Beach History, Movies and Music Trolley Tour. I’m Kathryn Hedgepath. I’m the creator and narrator of all the Myrtle Beach History tours. This is Tom Matthews. We are with Carolina Limousine and Coaching. We are gonna take you around Myrtle Beach and tell you its well coming of age story from the mid-20th century to present day. The movies that were made or premiered here and our impact on music history.
Aislyn: I’m sitting in a custom-made trolley with elegant wood seats. It’s wonderfully air-conditioned, a nice respite from the heat of the day. King’s Highway is the main thoroughfare in Myrtle Beach, and as the trolley turns onto it, Kathryn explains what we’ll be doing today.
Kathryn: Now, we’re going to make two stops. The first is going to be in the New Historic District. And the second is going to be at Charlie’s Place Historic Site. Now, it’s just kind of mind boggling that the biggest names in 20th-century music perform right here in Myrtle Beach from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Aislyn: We’re driving along Ocean Boulevard now—and shocker, you can see the ocean from the street—and we pass hotel after gorgeous hotel. Many of which have been used as film settings. Kathryn starts to rattle off the city’s illustrious film history. From the 1967 premier of the beach classic Don’t Make Waves to the much more recent, and scantily clad, filming that took place here.
Kathryn: Now in 2014, you had Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, and some other hunky guys for the filming of Warner Brothers second movie they made here, Magic Mike XXL. They shot the last scene of Magic Mike XXL on the boardwalk. And then the whole cast and crew just walked down the boardwalk to have the party right there at the 8th Avenue Tiki Bar.
Aislyn: But I’m especially taken by the city’s music history. During my visit, the city was preparing to host the ninth annual Carolina Country Music Fest. So maybe it’ll come as no surprise that one of country music’s greatest acts has roots here.
Kathryn: Now, they’re just three cousins from Fort Payne, Alabama, who, from 1973 to 1980, were the house band in a dive bar. Now, and they started out, they called themselves Young Country. But after a while, they changed their name from ’77 to Wild Country. But then in ’79 they changed their name to Alabama. Apparently that worked out well for them. Because that’s where everything took off. Now that little dive bar, the Bowery, well, you’re going to see it in about three minutes.
Aislyn: That legendary bar still exists and looks much like it did back when it opened in 1944. But there’s another very special place, where some of the most important Black musicians of the 20th century played.
Kathryn: Welcome to Charlie’s Place. This is Sarah and Charlie Fitzgerald. They moved to Myrtle Beach in 1935. They opened the club in 1937 and then years later they opened the motel.
Aislyn: Charlie’s Place was a music club and a motel for Black musicians. We’ve stepped out of the trolley and on one side of us, there’s this charming, midcentury-style motel painted bright white. As we enter, Kathryn explains why it became a gathering place for musicians.
Kathryn: One, Charlie’s Place was on the Chitlin Circuit. If you’re not familiar with that term, back during segregation, Black performers weren’t allowed for the most part to play, you know, popular, large venues. But there were these other smaller venues where they could play, and that became the Chitlin Circuit.
Aislyn: Bigger names also hung out at Charlie’s Place, because even if they were “allowed” to play white venues, segregation didn’t allow musicians to do more than that. So they needed a place to stay—and to hang out.
Kathryn: You had musical acts, especially during the Swing Era, like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie. They were so popular, they were booked in the big ballrooms, and because of segregation, all they could do was just play their gig. They couldn’t hang out there. They certainly couldn’t stay there. So then they would come down here, um, for what Charlie would market as Saturday night specials, doing these jam sessions. Can you imagine being in a small venue, with like Duke Ellington? I mean, it’s incredible.
Aislyn: Kathryn says that locals also called this place Whispering Pines.
Kathryn: There’s a legend behind that name, and it would have had to come into being in 1937, that was the year that the club opened; ’37 was also the one year that Billie Holiday, Lady Day, um, sang as what they called during the swing era as the girl singer for Count Basie. She was popular enough, she sang in clubs in New York and Chicago, but for one year she traveled around with Count Basie’s orchestra. So we know Count Basie was there, that he had come here. Now there was a stage and a venue inside, but there was an outdoor patio as well. And the legend is that when Billie Holiday stepped on that patio and sang, her voice was so pure, it whispered through the pines.
Aislyn: Charlie’s Place has now been preserved, though it was almost lost to history.
Kathryn: In 2015, when the city started tearing down these motel units, people in the neighborhood came up and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, what are you doing? There’s significant historic value in this place.” So I can’t tell you how proud I am of my city. Not only did they stop, they pivoted. And they created a historic site that otherwise would have been lost forever.
Aislyn: The former motel and club will eventually be a community center and an event space, but a few of the rooms have been turned into a museum. The rooms are small but neat, with wrought-iron beds, mid century radios, posters of musicians like Ray Charles. There are even instruments.
Kathryn explains that history is also being preserved in Myrtle Beach’s new Arts and Innovation District.
Kathryn: Now, our historic era began in 2019. Its name had been from our generation, the super block, but the name changed to the Arts and Innovation District. And then in October of 2019, um, we received our historic district status.
Aislyn: The historic district connects directly with downtown—you could walk from the beach boardwalk to get to the area we’re standing in right now. We’re in front of the Grand Strand Brewing Company, the second new business to open in the district. I see a freshly painted white brick wall with a mural of people dancing the shag. There are a few renovated buildings and some housing. Eventually there will be a museum or two, a new library, a performing arts center, and so much more. But it will all retain this quintessential Myrtle Beach vibe.
Kathryn: We’re going to get back on the trolley, but as we do, I want you to look up Ninth Avenue here, because we are in phase one of the new historic district. Up Ninth Avenue is phase two. The city of Myrtle Beach bought up all those storefronts and you’ll see where they have put in sort of retro-looking awnings to make it look like it did back in the day.
Aislyn: Because there is a distinctly retro feel here. And that is often celebrated.
Retro Myrtle Beach Guy: Gosh. Well, I’m mostly known as the Retro Myrtle Beach Guy.
Aislyn: The next day, I meet with Retro in the Arts and Innovation District. Retro, as you may have guessed, isn’t his real name, but it’s the main focus of his YouTube channel, also called Retro Myrtle Beach Guy. And Retro totally looks the part. He’s got a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and a button-up Hawaiian shirt.
Retro’s videos are all about vintage car shows, theme park adventures, and mini golf guides, all in Myrtle Beach. (I haven’t mentioned it yet, but if you haven’t heard, Myrtle Beach is a huge golf capital, and that extends to mini golf.) Retro is also into highlighting things that most tourists miss.
Retro: Yeah, there’s a lot of little, hidden things. We have a pinball museum, which has all these gorgeous, classic pinball machines from some up to a hundred years old. And I had no idea this place was here. I was at a car show—that block. Not a couple weeks before, and like, oh, that’s where it is. It’s literally right here, hidden behind a bank. So, I mean, uh, a lot of this stuff is, yeah, you even have to ask people, where is this place, you know, or you’d never even know to check it out. There’s something for everybody here. Yeah, whatever odd interest you find, you’ll find something that’ll pique it here.
Aislyn: One thing that always piques my interest is food. And Retro shares a mind-boggling statistic.
Retro: We supposedly have a higher concentration of restaurants than like New York and Paris. Over 2,000 restaurants here. So every year you’re like, well I didn’t get to go to that place yet, but there’s 10 more places that just opened up.
Aislyn: I googled this and it’s true: Myrtle Beach has more restaurants per capita than New York, Paris, and Rome. And when I ask Retro for a recommendation, in a very on-brand way, he highlights a vintage establishment.
Retro: We’ve got Peach’s Corner right down the road. That was from 1937. According to the signs on the wall, the world-famous Footlong Hot Dog, I’m sure it wasn’t actually invented there, but that’s where the Footlong Hot Dog’s from. Um, yeah, it’s a testament to how old the place is. One of the signs on the wall says, What are cheese fries? Because apparently that was a new invention that no one had ever heard of when that sign was made.
Aislyn: I mean, a world before cheese fries? It’s hard to imagine. But it’s easy to imagine breakfast here, because there are a LOT of pancake houses. And there’s no way you can visit Myrtle Beach without visiting one of its iconic breakfast spots.
Server [More Johnny D’s background]: The red velvet waffles?
Aislyn: Oh thank you so much!
Server: You’re welcome. Enjoy!
Aislyn: I’m at Johnny D’s Waffles and Benedicts, a Myrtle Beach institution.
Chef Jamie Daskalis: My name is Jamie Daskalis. I am the chef and owner of Johnny D’s Waffles and Benedicts and the Tasting Room on 9th in Myrtle Beach.
Aislyn: Johnny D’s has been around for about 10 years, there are three locations, each of which serves breakfast and lunch. As the name implies, they specialize in waffles and benedicts. And I’m eating one of chef Jamie’s famous red velvet waffles as we chat.
Jamie: We’re just like an American style diner. With really good food. And like, you know, you go into a diner, you hustle and bustle, you know, all the plate slinging, you know, food comes out fast, you know, it’s just like that. And when people come in and they say, this reminds me of a diner, I’m like, ah . . . we did good today.
Aislyn: During the week, I returned to Johnny D’s twice, once for a street corn omelette and once for the chipotle bacon skillet and a spicy bloody mary made with a local pepper vodka. It’s one of those amazing bloody marys with a garnish that’s like a breakfast unto itself: slices of chorizo, bites of pepper jack cheese, pepperoncinis, and olives. All delicious. But when it come to food here, there’s a lot more under the hood.
Andre James: I think people go there for like two days and they never leave like King’s Highway.
Aislyn: That’s Andre James, a freelance food writer who grew up in Southport, North Carolina, about 40 minutes north of Myrtle Beach. He says Myrtle Beach was kind of like his backyard growing up. And Andre wrote this great Eater guide to Myrtle Beach. So I reached out to him before my trip to get his take on where to eat.
Andre: You kind of go off the beaten path, so go to these little strip malls and stuff. You’ll find that it’s one of the most diverse food scenes in the country.
Aislyn: Andre says that it’s tourism itself that has created this diversity.
Andre: When the city was officially incorporated, they put all their eggs in the tourism basket. So you have these hotels that people need to work at. So what happened was Myrtle Beach started letting the J 1 visa workers come work for the summer, and a lot of them end up having to stay and having families.
Aislyn: Now you can find Georgian food, German food, Brazilian food, Filipino food, even legit Jamaican food. Andre loves a place called Home Style Jamaican Restaurant.
Andre: I know what good Jamaican food tastes like and like that place is, that place is spot on. Like the curry goat, the oxtails, uh, jerk chicken, they got ackee and saltfish, which is Jamaica’s national dish. It’s very, very authentic.
Aislyn: To find it, you just have to look beyond the big restaurant billboards.
Andre: You just have to say, I’ll go in that strip mall. I’ll go in, you know, Anthony Bourdain, rest in peace. He would, he would have, he would have a field day. He would have a field day in Myrtle Beach for sure.
MIDROLL
Aislyn: As the week goes on, I make my way down the Grand Strand. Because, I’ve heard, there is some incredible nature to be found here.
Ann: Have you smelled a magnolia before? A wild magnolia.
Aislyn: I don’t know if I can say I’ve actually smelled one.
Ann: Well, you haven’t lived yet.
Aislyn: That’s Ann Wilson, interpretive ranger at Myrtle Beach State Park. The park is on the southern edge of the city, and it was the very first to open in South Carolina back in 1936. It’s so much a part of the city that its 312 acres include one mile of beautiful beach. And it’s pretty cool to see: If you approach it from the water, you see this bank of white sand backed by a raft of forest, mostly deciduous.
Ann and I are walking through the park. There are oak trees and the wax myrtles that gave Myrtle Beach its name, all filtering the bright sun. And we’ve just passed one of the park’s magnolia trees. They bloom every May and June and, honestly, they smell like heaven.
Ann: Alright. We’ll go smell a magnolia. I have this favorite tree, and so I almost never not drive by if there’s—see, I have to get a flower low enough.
Aislyn: OK, OK.
Ann: And so I make all my staff, “OK, we’re smelling this.” [They say] “Again, Ann?” Yes! ’Cause again, again, in a couple weeks, we won’t get to smell anymore for a year.
Aislyn: Ann has worked here, smelling magnolias and doing so much more for 30 years. She quite literally lives in the park, in a simple home that she shares with her husband, who is also a park ranger.
Ann: I’m known as Ann’s like … did she go grocery shopping? Did she leave the park this week? And sometimes, that answer is no.
Aislyn: Her love for the park is obvious. All 312 acres of it.
Ann: We are an urban park. And so we’re so tiny, and if this place wasn’t here, it would definitely be developed. So we have a one mile of undeveloped beach for the most part. I love that you can still come in here, and even on a really crazy day, you can still find a spot to yourself. And there is no other place in Horry County, the county that we’re in, where you can visit a maritime forest on a daily basis. A forest by the sea. And I love our fishing pier.
Aislyn: Ann is taking me to the fishing pier right now. It’s such a cool feeling to walk through the forest and then, boom, you’re at the ocean and all around us, people are fishing. A couple of times a month, Ann leads crabbing tours, or workshops like the punnily named What Wildlife Will A-Pier?
Ann: So today in just an hour and a half, we had baby sharks, gosh, six, seven inches, brand new, super cute. We had a puffer fish, we had spade fish, we had moon fish. We did have some speckled crabs and lots of teeny tiny baby hermit crabs. And we saw schools of fish and jellyfish. And, I mean, it’s just, it’s kind of like the job again. Every time we go out crabbing, you know, in my head I’m like, “Oh, here we go. I don’t know how it’s going to go. I hope we catch stuff.” And we have no idea what’s going to be caught or am I going to know what it is. Because it is the ocean.
Aislyn: They return all those creatures to the sea, by the way. Because the state park is so central and so busy, it’s easy to forget how ancient some of the landscapes are. Ann and I are walking by a sloped, treed section that I would never think to look at twice.
Ann: So here we are in this urban park, so, you know, we’re at, we’re in the Low Country. We’ll look at that hill. So that’s an old ancient sand dune. But also, see, we’re in a state park, and look, we can’t even cross the road. Right? So, yeah, probably 10,000 years old. Wow.
Aislyn: The park’s beach is filled with people laughing and playing. I can see Myrtle Beach’s skyline in the distance, but if I turn around, it’s just green. And it’s kind of like you can see all the fun to be had in the city but you’re in a little oasis. That’s what Ann likes too.
Ann: I love that we’re just surrounded by, you know, one of the busiest places in South Carolina. And I mean, lots of people here and then we’re just seeing this cool, little wildlife spectacle.
Aislyn: Farther down the Grand Strand is another lush green place, but with a very different history.
Boat tour guide: You have the Europeans settling here. They are expected to find a cash crop. How did they know, moving here, this massive forest? And you see a big open rice field here. It wasn’t always like that, right? It was old-growth forest. How did they know they could plant rice here?
Aislyn: That’s my tour guide, whose name I’ve forgotten in my excitement at seeing an alligator. We’re in a pontoon boat, slowly making our way down a creek at Brookgreen Gardens. Brookgreen is a botanical garden about a half an hour south of Myrtle Beach. All around us are open expanses of what look like watery fields, interspersed with forested areas. We see turtles basking in the sun and more alligators, lurking beneath the water. And our tour guide is explaining why the forest in this marshy region was all torn out.
Tour guide: This was the big potential. Well, it’s because they knew that in this region, we share the three major conditions where they were already growing rice very successfully in another region of the world, in West Africa. Already by this time, for hundreds of years, West Africa, which was known as the Rice Coast, was growing rice. Senegal, Sierra Leone, parts of Gambia.
And they share these conditions we have. A hot and humid climate in the summer, the freshwater tidal rivers that they have learned to harness with those rice trunks for irrigation, and a nutrient rich, dense, fertile soil. Here there’s lots of nicknames for it. It’s called gumbo, pluck mud, georgetown clay, it’s nasty stuff.
Aislyn: This was in the 18th century. And you can probably guess what happened next, since the Europeans weren’t willing to actually do the work.
Tour guide: So who’s going to do it? The West Africans, right? They started to be targeted and sought after specifically from West Africa, enslaved and brought over here to build this industry.
Aislyn: And it was horrible, brutal work.
Tour guide: So it took 7 to 10 years to build up one rice field, up to 70 acres. Every plantation had many. So for instance, our four plantations here at Brookgate Gardens, total 3,500 acres of rice fields built up out of the swamps, surrounded by 35 miles of dikes built up by hand. Everything done in here, again, was done manually. So it’s one of the most labor intensive crops you could ever get into.
Aislyn: There are many eras that have unfolded in this green place: many intensly tragic, some more uplifting. Brookgreen’s intention is to hold all of these stories and share them with travelers.
Paige: Well, our mission is interpreting the history of the Low Country, of our region, and that it would, it’s critical to include enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and of course the plantation owners, since this was the site of four plantations. So we tell the story from, um, Native Americans who were first here through the Huntingtons, and a focus of most of our interpretation is around the Huntingtons and the garden.
Aislyn: That’s Paige Kinnery, the president and CEO of what is now Brookgreen Gardens. There’s some construction going on and Paige and I are standing in front of what will eventually be the garden’s conservatory and welcome center.
After my boat tour, I walked around the gardens, which are enormous and intoxicatingly green. I followed the Lowcountry Trail, where stainless steel sculptures from the artist Babette Bloch tell the story of the plantation era. I pass the Lowcountry Zoo, where alligators, foxes, and river otters live. I also pass some baby goats and even meet Angus.
Aislyn (in gardens): Is Angus the garden mascot?
Dog walker: He is our ambassador.
Dog walker: He is a Scottish deerhound. And the reason we have a Scottish deerhound is because Anna Huntington used to breed Scottish deerhounds.
Aislyn: And you get to be the lucky one who gets to walk him around?
Dog walker: This is my day. We have different people, different days. Yeah. And he’s descended from the bloodlines of Anna Huntington’s dogs.
Aislyn: Paige tells me that Anna Huntington, and her husband, Archer, bought the property in the 1930s. Though it was really more Anna’s thing.
Paige Kinnery: Anna Huntington immediately knew that this was a place that needed to be open to the public. And she took those existing roads that the planters had made and made them the center of the garden in the shape of a butterfly. So we think really took something and made it beautiful and accessible and transformed it into America’s first sculpture garden.
Aislyn: Anna was unusual for her time.
Paige: Yes, before she was married, she was very wealthy, by her trade. She was a renowned sculptor. She met Archer Huntington when they were in their forties. So they got married late and she had TB, which is why she came to this area looking for a warmer place to sculpt.
Aislyn: Brookgreen is famous for its sculpture garden, which has the largest collection of American figurative sculpture in the country. There are more than 2,000 works, including more than 100 from Anna, who designed the gardens herself. Paige takes me to one of her favorite sculptures.
Paige: So this beautiful pool around Diana, a very popular sculptural theme of Diana of the Hunt. She has a dog at her feet and really just framed by all these beautiful, live oak trees. And these trees are 250, 60 years old.
Aislyn: We’re looking into a large, brick-walled pond. And in the center is a brick pedestal with a bronze Diana looking as though she’s just flung an arrow into the sky. Anna created all of this during the Depression, when there wasn’t a lot of sculpture being purchased commercially. Anna wanted to step in and support artists.
Paige: So she was helping these artists continue their careers and placing their work outdoors, which was really something that wasn’t done much on a museum scale, right? This sculpture, actually, the Diana was in their home in New York City and she moved it from there to really be one of the first and the centerpiece of the garden.
Aislyn: I ask Paige about the lush greenness of it all—when you drive down the highway to reach Brookgreen, you’re surrounded by this incredible vegetation on either side of you that reaches to the sky.
Paige: We call it the green wall. So this is because the, the Huntingtons’ purchased 9,127 acres. So most of that is in conservation easement. And then I think one of the things I always suggest to people when they’re coming is, this is so much about a place.
So wherever you are, that’s a really authentically, you know, integrated of art, of history, of, you know, the flora and fauna, that was the Huntingtons’ intention. And that’s something that we protect so that it will always be a place where you can really learn, dig, dig deep into all of how this Low Country area is integrated in all of this important mission.
Aislyn: That includes the Gullah Geechee Gaardin, which honors Gullah history. Because you can’t, or shouldn’t explore this part of South Carolina without doing so.
Marilyn Hemingway: So my name is Marilyn Hemingway. I am Black, African American, and Gullah Geechee. Gullah Geechee, yeah! And yes, there are Black Hemingways. You may have heard of Ernest. And there are a lot of us in South Carolina.
Aislyn: Marilyn is the CEO and founding president of the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce and the Gullah Geechee Chamber Foundation. We’re sitting in what will eventually be a resilience center, the hub of the Chamber of Commerce, and many other things.
I’ve driven south from Brookgreen to Georgetown, a charming, colorful town right on Winyah Bay. Georgetown is also home to several institutions that highlight Gullah history, including two museums. And Marilyn has deep roots here. Her ancestors have lived here in Georgetown since the late 1700s.
Marilyn: So the Gullah Geechee, we are descendants of individuals who were brought, bought, and kidnapped from primarily West Africa and Central Africa. Brought to the Caribbean, North and South America. And many people know it as the transatlantic slave route.
Aislyn: Marilyn says that many people, when they think of the plantation slavery system, think of cotton and tobacco.
Marilyn: Cotton is involved, but primarily the enslaved individuals were brought here because of their knowledge of how to control water and manage the land to grow rice, indigo, which is a plant that creates a blue dye, Sea Island cotton, and sugarcane.
Aislyn: Because there were so many enslaved people from different countries within Africa, they needed a common language.
Marilyn: And from there, this mixture of West Africa tribal languages and English created the Gullah language, Gullah Geechee. And also not just the language and how we speak, how we worship, the foods, when you hear okra, yams, watermelons, all from West Africa came with the enslaved individuals.
Aislyn: Marilyn is an amazing person. She has been named one of the 50 most influential people in the South, among many other awards, because of the work she’s doing to support and elevate the Gullah Geechee community. One of her initiatives is the Gullah Geechee Seafood Trail, which is the reason I’ve driven down here to Georgetown.
Marilyn: It shares the history of our maritime heritage, the connection to the water and also, if you, where you want to go visit, the restaurants, the seafood restaurants, just restaurants too. They’re going to have seafood on the menu. They’re going to be on it. The landmarks, the museums. If you want to spend a day in Gullah Geechee Georgetown, you could go to the, “see the culture” and it has it broken down by county.
Aislyn: The trail just launched in May 2024. Because Marilyn sees tourism as a key tool for supporting her community.
Marilyn: So my lane, and I said it from day one, economic uplift. Because I looked around and I see a beautiful culture that was created under the worst of circumstances, that for the first 400 years was never paid. And then when it was paid, it was bare minimum. We’re behind. And it was very intentional and deliberate to put our ancestors in slavery. We have to be intentional and deliberate in creating economic uplift and generational wealth. And I wanted to be part of the solution to that.
Aislyn: Her advocacy work is tied to environmental justice.
Marilyn: Because of our ancestors who knew how to control water and manage the land. We are inherently tied to the land and the water. As we all are. But this culture was created because of the knowledge, deliberately because of that knowledge. And so to honor them, through actually living it, our advocacy work has been the environmental justice work. What does that really mean? You must have healthy air, and healthy water and land to have healthy people. Healthy people lead to healthy households. Healthy households lead to healthy communities.
Aislyn: When it’s complete, the building we’re in—which was once a segregated doctor’s office—will be a fully off-the-grid building. And one of the first jobs they’ll be training community members for is to work in solar technology.
I say goodbye to Marilyn and walk to Georgetown’s boardwalk. Later that day, I stop at one of the restaurants on the Seafood Trail’s website called Eve’s Caribbean Soul Food, and eat a divine plate of jerk chicken with pilau rice, sautéed cabbage, and candied yams. It’s so good.
As the day goes on, I think about the painful history here, and the ways people like Marilyn are working to lift up their community—and use tourism to do so.
And I think about how I started my trip with a simple, lovely day at the beach, and with each successive day, I peeled another layer off this diverse, enigmatic place, ending with one of the Grand Strand’s foundational communities.
Marilyn: Enjoy us. I mean, we’re a beautiful culture. Come down, eat our food, eat our cooking, because it is well seasoned. Listen to our music because all of that’s the root of jazz. Just come on down and visit us.
Aislyn: Well, thank you for joining us for this episode of “Unpacking Myrtle Beach.” I had a wonderful trip—there were so many things I couldn’t include in this episode, so you’ll find links to my itinerary and all the places I visited in the show notes. Next week, we’ll be back with a special Halloween episode featuring the hosts of the podcast National Park After Dark.
Danielle: I have to say that one of the hotels that gets a lot of attention when it comes to this time of year is the Stanley Hotel outside of Rocky Mountain National Park. I don’t know if it’s the most haunted. I have been there multiple, multiple times.
We’ve done two live shows there. I do feel there’s something there. There’s a different energy to that space. But I find it really warm and comforting. Unlike how it’s advertised, usually with, you know, Redrum and murder and spooky scary. I have always found it extremely warm and inviting, and I love it there so much.
Ready for more unpacking? Visit afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter. The magazine is @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great stories. Subscribing makes this easy! You can find Unpacked on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And be sure to rate and review the show. It helps other travelers find it. We also want to hear from you: Is there a travel dilemma, trend, or topic you’d like us to explore? Drop us a line at afar.com/feedback or email us at unpacked@afar.com.
This has been Unpacked, a production of AFAR Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composition by Chris Colin.
And remember: The world is complicated. We’re here to help you unpack it.
