Overview:
This article explores the rise and collapse of Myrtle Beach’s first grand development effort, led by the Woodside Brothers of Greenville, South Carolina. Centered on the Ocean Forest Hotel, the piece traces how early 20th-century economic ambition, the 1929 stock market crash, and shifting coastal industries reshaped the region. Drawing connections to modern demographic challenges and historical disengagement in the South, the article examines how economic fragmentation affects not only communities—but how their history is remembered.
This interview, published by Emerging Civil War, offers insight into how regional history organizations grapple with broader demographic and economic shifts in the modern South. While the conversation focuses on Civil War round-tables in coastal North Carolina, the themes raised — economic narrowing, population aging, youth out-migration, and the erosion of historical continuity — closely mirror patterns that have shaped Southern coastal communities for nearly a century, including the rise and collapse of Myrtle Beach’s earliest grand development efforts.
Continuity Between the Woodside Hotel Collapse and Modern Coastal Memory Loss
The failure of the Ocean Forest Hotel, built by the Woodside Brothers in 1928, was not merely the collapse of a luxury resort — it marked a turning point in how the South’s coastal economy would develop, and how its history would be remembered.
The Woodside project represented a capital-intensive, diversified vision: hospitality, recreation, land stewardship, transportation, and employment were meant to function as a unified economic system. When the 1929 stock market crash wiped out the family’s financial empire, that integrated model disappeared almost overnight. What replaced it was not a continuation of long-term planning, but fragmentation — land sold in parcels, short-term speculation, and later a tourism economy dependent on seasonal labor.
Mike Powell of Emerging Civil War Interview
That shift mirrors what Mike Powell describes in the Emerging Civil War interview when he explains why younger generations leave coastal communities. Jobs narrowed to real estate and construction, industries that reward transience rather than permanence. Fishing and shrimping — once generational livelihoods in places like Southport and the Waccamaw coast — collapsed, removing the economic continuity that historically sustained local identity and memory.
As a result, history itself became detached from everyday life. Just as the Ocean Forest Hotel changed hands repeatedly before being demolished in 1974, the region’s historical narrative lost its institutional anchors. What remains today — a circular driveway repurposed as a traffic roundabout, or Civil War sites visited mainly by retirees — reflects a broader pattern: when economic systems fail to sustain communities across generations, historical memory becomes optional rather than inherited.
The reluctance Powell describes among schools and educators to engage deeply with Civil War history echoes this reality. Difficult history is easier to avoid in regions built around tourism and turnover, where long-term civic investment is thin. In both cases — the Woodside collapse and modern historical disengagement — the issue is not a lack of history, but the absence of economic structures that allow that history to remain lived, taught, and transmitted.
Long before Myrtle Beach became one of the most recognizable resort destinations on the East Coast, much of its shoreline was part of a bold and nearly forgotten experiment in American leisure, finance, and ambition — driven by a powerful Upstate South Carolina family.
That family was the Woodside Brothers, five brothers from Greenville who, in the 1920s, controlled one of the largest industrial and financial empires in the Southeast.
An Upstate Empire Meets the Coast
By the early 20th century, the Woodside family had amassed enormous wealth through textile manufacturing and banking. Their holdings included six cotton mills, the 17-story Woodside National Bank building (once the tallest structure in South Carolina), and Greenville’s famed Poinsett Hotel, a social and economic centerpiece of the region.
In 1925, the brothers made a move that would permanently reshape South Carolina’s coastline: they purchased approximately 66,000 acres of land along the Atlantic coast — stretching 14 miles of beachfront from what is now Myrtle Beach State Park north toward Atlantic Beach, extending inland to the Waccamaw River.
Their vision was not incremental development. It was total transformation.
A Resort Unlike Anything in America
The Woodsides envisioned a world-class resort community — one that would rival Europe’s elite coastal destinations and America’s most exclusive retreats. Plans called for:
- A luxury oceanfront hotel
- Multiple championship golf courses
- Horse stables and riding trails
- Quail hunting preserves
- Sailing and fishing facilities
- Boys’ and girls’ camps
- Six freshwater lakes
- Fully staffed recreational services, including horses and hunting dogs
To execute the vision, the family hired Raymond Hood, one of the most prominent architects of the era. Hood was already famous for designing the Chicago Tribune Tower and New York City’s Daily News Building, and would later go on to design Rockefeller Center and the RCA Building.
The Ocean Forest Hotel: A Million-Dollar Dream
Construction moved rapidly. In 1928, the centerpiece of the project opened: the Ocean Forest Hotel, quickly dubbed “The Million Dollar Hotel” by locals.
The structure was monumental for its time — 10 stories tall, 202 rooms, clad in marble, featuring grand ballrooms and a theater. When it opened, it was reportedly the largest hotel on the East Coast within a 200-mile radius.
Despite Prohibition, the hotel operated with a full bar, benefiting from its isolation and limited law-enforcement presence. Guests arrived seeking luxury, privacy, and escape — exactly what the Woodsides had promised.
Collapse After the Crash
The dream was short-lived.
The 1929 stock market crash devastated the Woodside empire. The family lost control of their assets, including the Ocean Forest Hotel and vast coastal holdings. Much of the land reverted to Burroughs & Chapin, the original sellers, while smaller tracts were subdivided and sold as homesites through real estate clubs during the Great Depression.
Over the next 45 years, the hotel changed hands repeatedly. By 1974, it was demolished.
What Remains Today
Today, the grand resort itself is gone — but its imprint remains embedded in Myrtle Beach’s geography.
The circular driveway of the Ocean Forest Hotel still exists, serving as a modern traffic roundabout at the intersection of Ocean Boulevard, Poinsett Road, and Calhoun Road. Many of the road names in the area trace directly back to the Woodside family and their Greenville roots.
Myrtle Beach, as it exists today, grew from the fragments of that original vision — a reminder that one Upstate family once owned nearly all of its shoreline and tried to build the most ambitious resort America had ever seen.
Sources
- University of South Carolina Digital Collections (.edu)
Woodside Mills, Greenville industrial history, and South Carolina coastal development
https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/ - Publisher: South Carolina Encyclopedia (a project of the South Carolina Humanities Council)
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