The name Withers is everywhere in Myrtle Beach if you know where to look. Withers Swash cuts through the heart of the city, draining into the Atlantic through a salt marsh corridor that the City of Myrtle Beach has spent millions developing into a 15-acre park with a disc golf course, a dog park, and a 1,500-foot boardwalk.
Plans call for a linear park stretching the entire length of the swash to the beach. Withers Memorial Cemetery sits at 709 Collins Street, where ground-penetrating radar identified roughly 25 unmarked burial sites in 2009. Withers Swash Drive carries the name through daily traffic.
But the family that gave these places their name has been gone from Horry County for nearly two centuries. Who they were, what they built, and what erased them from the landscape they once owned is a story worth knowing — because it is, in many ways, the origin story of Myrtle Beach itself.
The Withers family Horry County history stretches from British Crown land grants to a hurricane that swept an entire household into the Atlantic.
A 66,000-Acre Kingdom on the Carolina Coast
Understanding the Withers Family Horry County History
The Withers family arrived in the Carolina Lowcountry as beneficiaries of the British Crown’s land-grant system, receiving a grant of 66,000 acres spanning what are now Georgetown and Horry Counties.
Several family members received individual grants within this territory: John, Richard, William, and Mary Withers all held parcels, though the family’s center of gravity settled at Long Bay, where John and Mary Esther Withers held 3,000 acres around the swash that still carries their name, known variously as Withers Swash, Myrtle Swash, or Eight-Mile Swash.
The family’s earliest commercial venture was indigo cultivation. When indigo markets collapsed after independence severed the British subsidy, the Withers shifted to timber — a pragmatic move that reflected Long Bay holdings more suited to longleaf pine than plantation agriculture.
The Georgetown branch operated on a different model. James Withers, who lived from 1710 to 1756, founded Friendfield Plantation on the Sampit River, developing it from 1734 onward as a rice and indigo operation built on enslaved labor.
James started as a brick maker in Charleston before becoming a planter — colonial Carolina’s planter class was less an aristocracy than a commercial enterprise, absorbing men who had made money elsewhere and reinvesting it in land and human beings.
Mary Esther and the Long Bay Retreat
The American Revolution reshaped the Withers family’s geography. When British soldiers moved through Georgetown, the family relocated to the relative isolation of Long Bay — a decision that speaks to just how remote the Grand Strand was in the late eighteenth century.
The coast that now hosts 14 million tourists a year was, in the 1770s, a place you went to disappear.
Mary Esther Withers, wife of John, became the central figure of this chapter. Her tombstone at Prince George Winyah Episcopal Church in Georgetown — a primary source that has survived more than two centuries — records her death on March 12, 1801, at age 61, and offers a portrait of a woman who chose hardship over comfort: “She gave up the pleasures of society and retired to Long Bay where she resided a great part of her life devoted to the welfare of her children.
Mary Esther was the mother of Francis, Richard, and Robert Withers. Georgetown in the late eighteenth century was a prosperous rice port with a social life to match. Long Bay was sand, pine forest, and isolation. Mary Esther’s choice was not sentimental — it was a strategic retreat to protect her children during wartime, and she never fully returned.
During George Washington’s Southern Tour in 1791, the president traveled the King’s Highway through the Grand Strand and was led across Withers Swash to Georgetown by Jeremiah Vereen. The fact that the swash was already identified by the Withers name — more than a decade before Mary Esther’s death — confirms how firmly the family’s identity was stamped on this stretch of coast.
The Hurricane of 1822 and the Ghost That Floats
The event that ended the Withers family’s presence at Long Bay was the hurricane of September 1822. Eighteen people took refuge in the Withers family home as the storm bore down on the coast. The house was lit with candles and lanterns against the darkness. The storm surge destroyed the structure and swept it into the water.
The historical record fractures from there. Some sources place the house on the bluff above Withers Swash; others locate it near North Inlet in Georgetown County.
Some accounts hold that Robert Francis Withers survived as the sole family member to escape the flood; others maintain that all eighteen perished. **What is clear is that the storm was catastrophic enough to end the family’s Long Bay settlement permanently.**
The hurricane also produced one of the Grand Strand’s two enduring ghost stories — a tale of “a house, lit up like a ship, floating down to the shore,” carried by the storm surge into the Atlantic.
The other ghost story from the 1822 storm is the Gray Man of Pawleys Island, which has attracted far more attention, but the image of a glowing house drifting seaward is arguably the more haunting. It persists because it encodes a real historical trauma — the moment when a family that had occupied this coast for generations was swept away in a single night.
From Indigo to Rice to Michelle Obama
Francis Withers, Mary Esther’s son, built a new house on Friendfield Plantation in 1818 and operated it until his death in 1847, at which point the plantation passed out of the direct Withers bloodline. By the 1850s, Friendfield’s labor force comprised approximately 230 enslaved African Americans producing 900,000 pounds of rice annually — placing it among the most productive plantations in the Georgetown rice district.
One of those 230 people was Jim Robinson, born at Friendfield in 1850. After emancipation, Robinson gained his freedom at age fifteen and likely sharecropped on the same land where he had been enslaved.
His grandson, Fraser Robinson Jr., joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, where his descendants would include Michelle Obama. The line from Friendfield’s rice paddies to the White House is direct and documented — a connection that says as much about what the Withers family built as it does about the people who were forced to build it.
The family’s influence also extended through naming. Governor Robert Francis Withers Allston, South Carolina’s 67th governor from 1856 to 1858, was not a blood relative. He was named for Robert and Francis Withers, who had assisted his father in a debt transaction in 1800. That a future governor carried their names as a mark of gratitude suggests the family’s standing in Georgetown’s planter society.
Salt, War, and the Marines
The Civil War brought the Withers name back into the military record, though the family was long gone. A Confederate salt production facility operated at Withers Swash, where workers used circular iron pans roughly four feet across to evaporate seawater into salt — a commodity so critical to the war effort that salt workers received military service exemptions.
On April 24, 1864, marines from the USS Ethan Allen came ashore and destroyed six salt pans, three warehouses, and an estimated 2,000 bushels of salt. Military historians have described the raid as one of the first amphibious assaults conducted by the United States Marine Corps— a distinction that gives Withers Swash an unlikely place in the history of American military doctrine.
The Name That Outlived the Family
After the 1822 hurricane, the surviving Withers family abandoned their Long Bay holdings and the land reverted to forest. But the name persisted. When the federal government established a post office in the area on April 30, 1888 — more than sixty years after the family’s departure — it was named Withers.
The post office operated under that name until 1901, when the community adopted “Myrtle Beach,” suggested by Addie Burroughs for the wax myrtle bushes that grew in the area. The transition from Withers to Myrtle Beach was also a transition in ownership.
In 1881, the Burroughs and Collins Company of Conway purchased the former Withers land — a transaction that laid the foundation for the resort development that would transform the Grand Strand. Burroughs and Collins was the predecessor to the Burroughs & Chapin Company, and the land that the Crown had granted to the Withers family, that Mary Esther had retreated to during the Revolution, that the 1822 hurricane had emptied of human habitation, became the raw material for a tourism economy that now generates billions annually.
At Withers Memorial Cemetery on Collins Street, Captain Withers and one child are believed buried in unmarked graves. Around 1870, William Todd, a Confederate veteran, acquired 700 acres of the former Withers holdings and donated the cemetery parcel to First Baptist Church.
What the Withers Name Means Today
No evidence indicates that direct Withers descendants remain in Horry County today. Friendfield Plantation, which passed out of Withers hands entirely when it was sold to B. Walker Cannon in 1897, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 and encompasses roughly 3,305 acres. The family’s coastal holdings became a city.
Their inland plantation became a historical landmark. Their enslaved workers’ descendants reached the White House.
What the Withers family story illustrates is how thin the line is between founding a place and being forgotten by it. The swash still carries their name, and the cemetery, and a handful of street signs — monuments most residents drive past without a second thought.
The city’s planned linear park along Withers Swash will turn the family’s last geographic marker into a public amenity serving 14 million annual visitors who have never heard the name. Whether that counts as legacy or erasure depends on whether we bother to remember the story behind the swash.
Further Reading
– [Visit Myrtle Beach](https://www.visitmyrtlebeach.com/article/the-history-of-the-withers-swash-neighborhood) — “The History of the Withers Swash Neighborhood”
– [Myrtle Beach Point of View](https://myrtlebeachpointofview.wordpress.com/2022/05/31/the-withers-family-history-and-myrtle-beach/) — “The Withers Family History and Myrtle Beach” (2022)
– [South Carolina Encyclopedia](https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/horry-county/) — “Horry County” and “Allston, Robert Francis Withers”
– [Friendfield Plantation](http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/georgetown/S10817722037/index.htm) — National Register of Historic Places listing (1996)
– [Prince George Winyah Parish](https://www.pgwinyah.com/historic-cemetery) — Historic Cemetery, Georgetown
– [Withers Memorial Cemetery](https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2241367/withers-memorial-cemetery) — Find a Grave
– [MyHorryNews.com](https://www.myhorrynews.com/visit/local-history-april-marks-160th-anniversary-of-raid-on-myrtle-beach/article_415210b2-f0fa-11ee-a0a2-8f252dff1830.html) — Anniversary articles on Civil War salt works raids
– [Withers/Weathers Family History Collection](https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/1001/) — Winthrop University Archives
