The greatest success story in golf travel is located along the 60-mile stretch of Atlantic shoreline between Georgetown, S.C. and Southport, N.C.

It has really always been about the beach, and when it comes to its popularity as the golf capital of the world, Myrtle Beach owes as much to its expansive beaches as the all-inclusive golf package it has managed to perfect, and to the small group of visionaries that tied the two parts together. 

From modest beginnings 40 years ago, Myrtle Beach has become one of the best known and most popular golf resort areas in the country with over four million rounds played annually. It is truly grand in every sense, with more than 100 courses, 90,000 accommodations, 1,600 outlets for food and drink and a dizzying array of entertainment opportunities.  

Until the mid-1960s, Myrtle Beach was just like any one of countless beach communities that thrived only during the summer. But the full story of the area’s growth and its evolution as a golf destination began a century earlier. 

Northeast South Carolina was primarily woodland in 1857 when 22-year-old Franklin Burroughs first arrived. His success at creating public structures brought him the resources necessary to acquire timberlands and businesses. Eventually, Burroughs and a partner owned several businesses as well as 80,000 acres of South Carolina beachfront forest. 

While the Burroughs name continues to be synonymous with Myrtle Beach, it was a South Carolina textile magnate named John T. Woodside who first brought golf to the area. Woodside bought 64,488 acres from Burroughs with the intent of building a destination in the tradition of The Homestead or The Greenbrier. Known as Ocean Forest, the resort would include a hotel along a four-mile stretch of Atlantic beach and myriad activities, including golf a few miles inland. Woodside’s objective, according to newspaper accounts, was to assure that the “Myrtle Beach of the future will not be merely a two- or three-months winter resort but an ideal all-year-round playground, the Atlantic City of the South.”

Woodside opened the 27-hole Ocean Forest Club golf course and clubhouse in 1927. Construction was already underway on the 10-story, 220-room hotel, a palatial edifice with ballrooms, stables, swimming pools, shopping arcades and a patio overlooking a stretch of beach that had become known as the Grand Strand. But as construction neared completion on the massive hotel in October of 1929, the stock market crash drove Woodside to the brink of financial ruin. He managed to hold on to the golf course and hotel, which opened on schedule in January 1930. But by 1933, Burrough’s company, Myrtle Beach Farms, had reassumed much of what remained of Woodside’s holdings.

Fortunately, the golf club had begun to achieve national attention, playing host to some of the game’s biggest stars. Embracing Woodside’s idea of a thriving, year-round destination, Burroughs embarked upon a methodical plan to create a resort community from the dense coastal pine forests. By the 1950s, the firm now known as Burroughs & Chapin had shaped Myrtle Beach into the east coast’s most alluring vacation destination. There were dozens of hotels and golf courses, including Woodside’s original course that had been sold in 1944 and renamed Pine Lakes International. Fate wasn’t as kind to Woodside’s opulent oceanfront hotel. After several years and a succession of owners, the Ocean Forest Hotel was eventually demolished.

Perhaps the most prominent of the early Myrtle Beach courses was The Dunes Club, founded by a contingent of local businessmen led by attorney and real estate magnate George “Buster” Bryan. The group hired Robert Trent Jones Sr. to build the course on a remarkable piece of land just north of the center of town, enveloped between coastal salt marshes and the Atlantic. The first nine holes opened in October 1949, but the club was forced to sell shares throughout the community to finish the course. Bryan hired Jimmy D’Angelo away from Pine Lakes as the club’s first head professional, but much of D’Angelo’s job early on was to generate support for the fledgling project.