North Myrtle Beach — A Real Merged City, a Real Wind Pool, and a Real Dance Hall of Fame

What Actually Makes North Myrtle Beach Different

North Myrtle Beach did not grow organically from a single town the way most Grand Strand communities did -- it was legislated into existence. On May 7, 1968, the South Carolina General Assembly merged four separate, independently developed beach communities -- Cherry Grove Beach, Ocean Drive Beach, Crescent Beach, and Windy Hill Beach -- into one city, with Robert L. Edge serving as the first mayor, per the South Carolina Encyclopedia and the city's own history. A fifth adjoining community, Atlantic Beach -- a historically significant Black-owned beach resort founded during segregation and bordered on three sides by the new North Myrtle Beach -- was invited into the merger and declined, remaining its own small independent municipality to this day. That 1968 history still shapes the city on the ground: each of the four founding sections -- Cherry Grove in the north, Ocean Drive in the center, Crescent Beach just south of it, and Windy Hill at the southern end near Barefoot Landing -- retains a distinct identity, distinct architecture, and in real estate listings, its own neighborhood name, even though all four have shared one city government, one police department, and one set of municipal ordinances since 1968.

The city's cultural identity centers on the Carolina Shag, a smooth, low-to-the-ground partner dance that South Carolina designated its official state dance, with Ocean Drive widely credited as its birthplace among the beach-music dance halls that lined Main Street in the mid-20th century. That history is not folklore dressed up for tourists -- it is institutionalized. The Shaggers Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum preserving the dance's history with member biographies and memorabilia, operates today inside the Ocean Drive Beach & Golf Resort with free admission, and the Society of Stranders (SOS), the shag community's governing social organization, runs two major annual events: a Spring Migration (Spring Safari) and a Fall Migration, each drawing thousands of dancers to Ocean Drive's bars and dance halls -- named venues include Fat Harold's, Ducks, Duck's II, OD Arcade, Pirate's Cove, and the OD Beach & Golf Resort itself -- for roughly a week and a half of dancing, classes, and live beach music each spring and fall. Anyone planning a visit around these dates should confirm the current-year schedule directly with SOS (sosdancing.com), since exact dates shift year to year.

North Myrtle Beach sits inside the Grand Strand's broader identity as a golf destination -- the 60-mile Grand Strand corridor has been called the "Golf Capital of the World" and is home to more than 80 courses today, down from a reported peak of roughly 120 in the late 1990s before real estate development converted a number of courses to housing. Two of the area's most recognized courses sit inside the city itself: Barefoot Resort & Golf, which has four championship 18-hole courses individually designed by Pete Dye, Tom Fazio, Davis Love III, and Greg Norman (the Dye Course operates semi-privately), and the separately owned Tidewater Golf Club, which is frequently packaged with Barefoot tee times by area golf-travel operators. This is real, verifiable golf infrastructure, not a marketing claim -- but this page does not state current green fees, since those change seasonally and by course; confirm current rates directly with each course or a golf-package operator.

Geologically and administratively, North Myrtle Beach is a barrier-island coastal city inside Horry County, bounded to the north by the Little River Inlet and, just across it, Waties Island -- an undeveloped barrier island that extends nearly three miles to the South Carolina/North Carolina line. Roughly a third of Waties Island was bequeathed to Coastal Carolina University in 1995 by Anne Tilghman Boyce and is now protected by a conservation easement with The Nature Conservancy of South Carolina as the Anne Tilghman Boyce Coastal Reserve, with additional acreage moving toward becoming a new South Carolina state park through the Open Space Institute's ongoing conservation work. That undeveloped inlet-and-marsh landscape sits directly adjacent to some of the city's busiest oceanfront blocks, which is part of what makes North Myrtle Beach's coastline genuinely dynamic -- shaped by the inlet's sand movement, by regular federally funded renourishment, and by real, documented erosion events, not by a static, unchanging beachfront.

None of that history, culture, or geography substitutes for verified financial and risk detail, and this page does not blur the two. The 2020 Census counted 18,790 year-round residents; Horry County's overall property tax millage rate was rolled back from 56.2 to 52.1 mils for fiscal year 2025 due to reassessment growth, per Horry County's own reporting and MyHorryNews -- but that county figure is layered with a separate city millage inside North Myrtle Beach's own limits, and this page does not state a single combined mill rate as though it were confirmed, because the two layers were not independently reconciled into one number for this build. Home values, similarly, are reported differently by different platforms -- Zillow's average home value and Redfin's median sale price differ by tens of thousands of dollars depending on methodology and month -- and this page names both rather than picking one and presenting it as the number. Every topic page linked below goes deeper on one specific piece of this picture -- cost, tax, insurance, flood risk, storm history, neighborhoods, and recreation -- and each one names its own sources and its own gaps.