The Grand Strand refers to a large stretch of beaches on the East Coast of the United States extending from Little River to Georgetown in the U.S. State of South Carolina. It consists of 60+ miles along an essentially uninterrupted arc of beach land, beginning around the Little River and terminating at Winyah Bay. The population of the Grand Strand was 329,449 at the 2010 United States Census.
It is said that Grand Strand term was coined by The Myrtle Beach Sun columnist Claude Dunnagan in 1949. and "Strand" itself derives from the German, meaning "beach". In fact, Dunnagan wrote a column "From the Grandstand" dated November 19, 1949, in The Myrtle Beach News, and one called "From the Grand Strand" on December 3, 1949. The Sun was not published until 1950.
The Grand Strand has become a major tourist attraction along the Southeastern coast, with its primary city, Myrtle Beach, attracting over ten million visitors each season. It is home to numerous restaurants and theme parks, making it popular with families and college students in the summer and Snowbirds during the winter.
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Famous quotes containing the words grand and/or strand:
“The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus would education conspire with the Divine Providence.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)