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North Myrtle Beach News

North Myrtle Beach

The History of North Myrtle Beach: Our Complete, Authoritative Investigation

The Complete History of North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina From Shell Mounds to the Shag: How Nine Miles of Coastline Became Home Introduction If you’ve …

2nd Annual Oyster Roast for the Coast

2nd Annual Oyster Roast for the Coast a huge success

Oyster Roast For The Coast

“OYSTER ROAST FOR THE COAST” this Saturday in North Myrtle Beach

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Parking Registration Now Open for NMB Residents and Non-Resident Property Owners

The Hucks Family: Four Centuries from Jamestown Virginia to the Carolina Lowcountry A Genealogical Journey Through Colonial America and the Rise of a Horry County Legacy MyrtleBeachSC News was founded by David Hucks of Myrtle Beach in 2004. The Hucks family first arrived in Jamestown Virginia in 1607 and were among the first English people in America. Of the approximately 104 to 108 original settlers who arrived at Jamestown in May 1607, roughly 66 to 70 died within the first year. By January 1608, only about 38 survivors remained due to starvation, disease, and conflicts with local tribes. The Hucks family were among the few to survive these brutal first few years. Introduction For those of us who call Horry County home, the name Hucks resonates with a deep sense of place. It is stitched into the fabric of old church records, plantation ledgers, and cemetery stones scattered across the coastal parishes of South Carolina. But the roots of this family reach far deeper — and far farther — than the sandy soil of the Pee Dee region. The Hucks line can be originally traced across the Atlantic Ocean to  Sir William Hux and his wife Lady Harriett Rimn Hucks. The name would later be changed to Hucks. Sir William and Lady Harriett served in Queen Elizabeth's court in the late 1550's. Joseph Hucks, Sir William's son, left Gloucester, England in 1606, and arrived in America in 1607 through the desperate early years of Jamestown, Virginia, into the tidewater parishes of Surry County. In 1702, the family would ultimately move southward into the tobacco and rice-rich lowcountry of Prince William Parish, South Carolina. They migrated into what is today Conway. The family focused on growing tobacco and harvested timber. This is a story that spans roughly four hundred years and concludes, for the purposes of this article, with the death of John Washington Hucks on December 10, 1979, the death of his son, J.L. Hucks in Mullins, to now his Grandson David Hucks, who is a partner at MyrtleBeachSC News. Understanding families like the Hucks is not merely an exercise in genealogical curiosity. It is a way to understand how the Lowcountry was built, who built it, and what legacies — the unremarkable, the luminous and complicated — left behind for communities like ours. From Gloucester to Jamestown: The Founding Generation Joseph Hucks, born around 1580 in Gloucester, England, was among the waves of Englishmen drawn to the Virginia Colony during its turbulent infancy [Hucks Family Records; Early Virginia Settlers]. Gloucester, a prosperous market town on the River Severn, produced many adventurers willing to risk the Atlantic crossing for the promise of land and opportunity. Joseph made that crossing and ultimately died in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1650. Life in early Jamestown was brutal. The "Starving Time" of 1609–1610, recurrent conflicts with the Powhatan Native American Confederacy. Rampant disease killed the vast majority of settlers.
MyrtleBeachSC News - 300 years in the making #myrtlebeach #localnews #myrtlebeachsc
A deep-dive analysis for Horry County residents | March 2026 Introduction: A Name You Should Know On September 9, 2023, Scott Spivey — a 33-year-old insurance adjuster from Tabor City, North Carolina — drove down Highway 9 in Horry County for the last time. What followed over the next nine miles ended with Spivey dead on Camp Swamp Road, a rural stretch in the Longs community just south of the North Carolina line. Two men — Weldon Boyd, the well-known owner of Buoys on the Boulevard in North Myrtle Beach, and his passenger Kenneth "Bradley" Williams — fired the shots that killed him. More than two years later, neither man has faced criminal charges. That reality, and the messy legal, political, and procedural story surrounding it, is why this case matters to every person who lives and works along the Grand Strand. The case has drawn national attention, and for good reason. It touches on road rage, the reach of South Carolina's Stand Your Ground law, the conduct of local law enforcement, and the long shadow of political connections in a small coastal community. On March 6, 2026, Circuit Court Judge Eugene Griffith Jr. denied immunity to both Boyd and Williams in the civil wrongful death lawsuit filed by Spivey's family — a ruling that keeps the door open for accountability, even as serious criminal questions remain unanswered. [WPDE, 2026; WMBF, 2026] Section 1: What Happened on Highway 9 — Two Very Different Stories Section 1.1: The Role of Weldon Boyd in the Incident The facts of the encounter are not as simple as either side would like them to be. What everyone agrees on is this: Boyd, pulling a trailer loaded with Tractor Supply purchases and heading toward his blueberry farm outside Loris, encountered Spivey on Highway 9 sometime that evening. Both men had guns. By the time their trucks came to rest on Camp Swamp Road, Spivey was dead from a gunshot wound to his right side, near the armpit, with a second graze injury to his cheek. [FITSNews, 2026] Boyd and Williams claim Spivey was the clear aggressor from the start — that he drove erratically, ran Boyd off the road into a median near a Food Lion, and repeatedly pointed a firearm at them while in motion. They say they followed Spivey while on the phone with 911 in an attempt to keep authorities informed of a dangerously armed and apparently drunk driver. [WMBF, 2026] Surveillance footage from Boardwalk Billy's restaurant showed Spivey consumed a substantial amount of alcohol in the hours before the incident. Forensic testing confirmed his blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit at the time of his death. [FITSNews, 2026] The Spivey family's account, supported in part by an independent eyewitness, tells a different story. Frank McMurrough, a Virginia man driving to the Myrtle Beach area with his wife that evening, witnessed the final moments of the confrontation firsthand. His deposition described Spivey exiting his truck with his firearm pointed downward at his side — not raised toward Boyd's vehicle. McMurrough said the slide on Spivey's gun was locked back, a detail that matters: it indicates the weapon had either already been fired or was empty and not capable of firing again. [Post and Courier, 2026]
Nine Miles to Camp Swamp Road The Spivey Case- What the bloggers didn't tell you #northmyrtlebeach
The Corner That Changed Everything: Kozy Korner and the Hidden History of Myrtle Beach The former Mayor of Myrtle Beach, Brenda Bethune purchased the property a few years ago. Now, developers are looking to tear down the historic Kozy Korner. What follows is the complete narrative on the building and the history other news outlets failed to report. There is a triangular sliver of a building at 815 Main Street in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina — wedged at a street corner two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, across from where the old Pavilion amusement park once spun its Ferris wheels. Today, a restaurant called Winna’s Kitchen occupies its tip. Tourists pass it without a second glance. But for much of the twentieth century, this modest diner operated under the name Kozy Korner Café, and what happened inside those walls quietly rewrote what was possible in a segregated Southern city. To understand Kozy Korner is to understand that American history rarely announces itself — it often happens over a plate of eggs, between a Marine and a cook, or across a diner counter where the rules were quietly, stubbornly ignored. A Family Finds Its Home by Accident The story of Kozy Korner’s most famous chapter begins with a detour. After World War II, a Greek-American couple named Tony and Angie Thompson were driving through Myrtle Beach en route to Florida, hoping to start a new life by opening a diner. They stopped at a local café called Kozy Korner for lunch. As recounted by their son Dino in interviews with Visit Myrtle Beach, the proprietor struck up a conversation, learned of their ambitions, and revealed that his establishment was available for lease — apartment upstairs included. By the end of the afternoon, Tony Thompson was introducing himself as the new owner [Visit Myrtle Beach, 2022]. It was a quintessentially American moment: a family of immigrants buying into a corner of the country that was, technically, not supposed to be open to everyone. From Dino’s upstairs bedroom, the whole world was visible — the beach two blocks away, the amusement park across the street, the bustle of downtown. He would eventually become the night manager at age ten, running the register while his parents operated their upscale steakhouse, the Black Angus, nearby. The Kozy Korner was the first of nine restaurants Tony Thompson would own in Myrtle Beach, and Dino worked at every one of them. What makes this origin story remarkable is not its immigrant hustle — though that alone is worthy of note. It is that the Thompsons arrived as outsiders themselves, and perhaps because of that, they ran their diner with a set of values that placed them decades ahead of their community. They weren’t making history, as Dino would later write — they were making a living. The distinction mattered. An Integrated Table in a Segregated South In the mid-1940s, when virtually every restaurant in South Carolina excluded Black customers from dining rooms — relegating them to side doors for takeout orders at best — the Kozy Korner was already seating them at tables.
Developers tear down historic Kozy Korner. What other news outlets didn't tell you #myrtlebeach
If you have ever sat on the MarshWalk watching the sun melt behind the cordgrass, you already know something true about Murrells Inlet that no history book can fully capture: this place holds on to things. It holds on to the smell of salt water and frying fish, to the memory of shrimpers who worked these tides before the restaurants arrived, to legends of pirates who slipped through the same creeks that now carry kayak tours. Murrells Inlet is not just the "Seafood Capital of South Carolina" — it is one of the oldest, most layered communities on the entire Eastern Seaboard, and most people driving through on Highway 17 have no idea. [MarshWalk History, 2023] What follows is not a dry list of dates. It is the story of a place shaped by the water around it — by the tides that carried rice and indigo to British merchants, by the coves that sheltered pirates from the Royal Navy, by the floods that broke the plantation economy, and by the generations of families who rebuilt something better each time the storms came through. For those of us who live here, this history is not past tense. It is buried in the names of the streets, the shape of the creeks, and the way the old-timers still talk about the inlet like it belongs to them. It does. [South Carolina Encyclopedia, 2022] Before John Morrall: The Land That Remembered The story of Murrells Inlet does not begin in 1731. It begins thousands of years earlier, written in shell middens and burial mounds along the high bluffs of the Waccamaw Neck. The Waccamaw people were the original stewards of this landscape, building their communities along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers and harvesting the extraordinary abundance of the tidal creeks — the same oysters, clams, shrimp, and fish that restaurants along the MarshWalk still serve today. [Wikipedia, Murrells Inlet, 2024] The name "Wachesaw," still used for a nearby community, is loosely translated as "Place of Great Weeping," a reference to the sacred burial grounds the Waccamaw maintained along these bluffs. When archaeologists excavated these mounds, they found something that complicates the idea of a clean before-and-after with European arrival: the graves contained both indigenous pottery and European glass beads, evidence that trade and contact happened long before formal colonization. The Waccamaw were not passive recipients of European civilization — they were active participants in a shifting world. [Wikipedia, Murrells Inlet, 2024; Hammock Coast SC, 2020] By the early 1700s, Spanish explorers had already mapped and named parts of this coastline, and the inlet's geography — its hidden coves, shallow tidal creeks, and access to the Waccamaw River — was already well understood by anyone who moved goods or people along the Carolina coast. When English colonist John Morrall arrived in 1731 and purchased 610 acres on the inlet, he was not discovering empty wilderness. He was planting a flag in a landscape that already had a long, complex human history. [SC Encyclopedia, 2022; Visit Myrtle Beach, 2023] So what? The Waccamaw people are not a footnote to Murrells Inlet's story — they are its opening chapter. The same tidal geography that made this inlet valuable to them is the reason it is valuable now. Every fresh shrimp served at a waterfront table is a continuation of a harvest that began thousands of years before anyone thought to name the place. The 18th century transformed Murrells Inlet from a remote coastal settlement into one of the busiest small ports in the Southern colonies. The engine of this growth was rice. By the mid-1800s, the plantations lining the Waccamaw Neck — Brookgreen, The Oaks, Springfield, Laurel Hill, Richmond Hill, and Wachesaw — were collectively producing close to 47 million pounds of rice annually, an output that dwarfed the tobacco and cotton yields of neighboring regions. Ships moved through the inlet's ports loaded with rice and indigo bound for British markets, with turpentine, cotton, and peanuts heading north to colonial cities. [Visit Myrtle Beach History Guide, 2023; MarshWalk FAQ, 2023] It was during this same era that the inlet earned its more colorful reputation. The early 18th century was the Golden Age of Piracy, and the Carolina coast — with its hidden inlets, shallow waters that could confound naval warships, and proximity to major Atlantic shipping routes — was prime territory for buccaneers in need of fresh water and a place to careen their hulls.
The Layered History of Murrells - Tourist Guide #myrtlebeach #murrellsinlet #myrtlebeachsc
If you've lived in North Myrtle Beach long enough, you know the rhythm of the place. The way the smell of salt air hits you the second you crack the car window on Highway 17. The sound of beach music drifts out of Fat Harold's on a Tuesday night. There’s a quiet pride in knowing this stretch of coast has a story most tourists never hear. The sound of beach music drifts out of Fat Harold's on a Tuesday night. There’s a quiet pride in knowing this stretch of coast has a story most tourists never hear. North Myrtle Beach is not a suburb of Myrtle Beach. It is not a spin-off or an afterthought. It is a city shaped by ancient peoples, colonial land grants, a catastrophic hurricane, a revolutionary dance, and the deliberate choices of the communities that came before it. To understand where this city is going, you have to know where it has been — and that story starts long before the first beach house was ever built. Section 1: The First People and the Long Shadow of Prehistory Long before any European ever set eyes on the Grand Strand, this stretch of coast was home to the Waccamaw and Winyah peoples. These were not transient visitors — they were established communities with deep knowledge of the land, the seasons, and the tides [South Carolina Encyclopedia, 2022]. Prehistoric shell deposits scattered throughout the area offer proof of just how long humans have been drawn to this coastline. They used it as a seasonal retreat and a source of sustenance. The same instinct that draws families back to the same rental house every summer has ancient roots here. This tavern served travelers passing between the Carolinas. A handful of prominent families, among them the Bellamys, Bessants, Nixons, and Vereens, gradually acquired large tracts across the northern strand. European and African settlement of the northern Grand Strand began in the early eighteenth century. In 1737, a man named William Gause received a land grant for 250 acres near what is now Windy Hill Beach. He farmed the land and established a tavern along the King's Highway — the colonial-era road running the length of the coast. He farmed the land and established a tavern along the King's Highway — the colonial-era road running the length of the coast — serving travelers passing between the Carolinas. A handful of prominent families, among them the Bellamys, Bessants, Nixons, and Vereens, gradually acquired large tracts across the northern strand. Unlike the rice-and-indigo plantation culture that dominated further south near Georgetown, the land here was better suited to timber harvesting and naval stores production. As a result, what developed was a culture of small, independent farming supplemented by fishing and logging. This culture was self-sufficient, insular, and proud of its identity. So what? The absence of a plantation economy here wasn't just an agricultural accident — it shaped the character of the community. North Myrtle Beach’s roots are working-class and deeply local. That independence is still visible in the way this city thinks about itself. For much of the nineteenth century, the northern strand remained isolated. The towns of inland Horry County — Conway, Loris, Aynor — were where life happened, sustained by tobacco farming that by 1920 had made Horry the top tobacco-producing county in South Carolina. The beach was a seasonal pleasure, not a destination. Every summer, farmers from western Horry County would make the journey by covered wagon to fish and enjoy the surf.
The Hidden History of North Myrtle Beach #northmyrtlebeach #northmyrtlebeachsc #myrtlebeachsc
An effort to consider Closed Primaries in S.C. elections was adjourned in an adhoc committee meeting yesterday by attorney S.C. Representative Justin T. Bamberg, who is a Democrat. Why is a Democrat serving in such a key judiciary committee since South Carolina has a Republican Super Majority? Understanding Closed Primaries and Their Impact No discussions nor debate were allowed on the closed primaries proposal by those on the committe. S.C. Republican C.J. Westfall described the events this way on X. Frustrating scenes from yesterday’s House Judiciary Tort Reform Ad Hoc Committee meeting on March 3, 2026, at 3:00 pm. H.5183 — Rep. Mike Burns’ clean closed primaries bill — was the real compromise we’ve been waiting for. It combines the best of H.3310 and H.3643, including the key language supporters of H.3643 wanted, to finally implement partisan voter registration, close our primaries to outsiders, without candidate qualifications that empowers insiders. It was added to the agenda at around 2:25 pm — less than an hour before the meeting started. Despite the short notice, many patriots contacted committee members to voice strong support. After handling the first two bills (4544 and 4670), discussion wrapped up… and the moment arrived for H.5183. Right then, Rep. Justin Bamberg moved to adjourn — the motion passed immediately — and the meeting ended without any debate or vote on closed primaries. You can see the confusion in the video: Rep. Kathy Landing asking “What happened to our agenda item?” before the feed cuts off. No discussion. No consideration. Just adjournment. House Judiciary Chairman Weston Newton wrote in the Post and Courier last month: “This debate alone deserves careful thought, not rushed conclusions.” But how can we have careful thought when the chairman isn’t allowing ANY debate? said Westfall. Bills get buried without a hearing. House Judiciary Committee leader, Weston J. Newton, from Beaufort, S.C. also claimed: “Recently, Republican voters in South Carolina were asked a clear and neutral question explaining both systems and the tradeoffs involved. Nearly two-thirds — 64 percent — said they want to keep our current open primary system. ” Fewer than one-third supported changing the law,” Newton fictitiously claimed. What is that “neutral” question he’s referencing? SCGOP Chairman Drew McKissick has addressed the issue directly this week. The real voice of Republican voters came through our party’s own ballot questions in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 — where an average of 82% supported partisan voter registration and closed primaries, with over 1.5 million votes cast in favor. Grassroots Republicans have spoken loud and clear, multiple times, in our primaries. This isn’t about what a selective poll from Rep. Newton says — it’s about freedom of association for political parties, keeping Democrats out of our nominee selection, and letting Republicans choose Republicans. South Carolina Republicans want this fixed. Our state party platform demands it. Resolutions have passed. Voters have voted overwhelmingly yes.
South Carolina "Closed Primaries" Debate Blocked, Confusion Follows – Our Investigative Report
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