Kari Collins was building her retirement home in Mount Gilead, a quiet corner of Murrells Inlet just off the Waccamaw Neck, when she found out the address she thought was Horry County might not be Horry County at all. "I'm building my retirement home, my dream home, in Mount Gilead," she told the Post and Courier in 2020. She and her husband had planned their whole retirement around staying in the county he'd lived in his entire life. Then state surveyors told her the line on the ground had never matched the line in the law.
It's a strange thing to learn about your own front yard. But it's also the clearest lesson Murrells Inlet has to offer anyone comparing homes here today: the county line running through this community is not a fact of geography you can take for granted. It's a legal decision, and legal decisions can be wrong for a very long time before anyone notices.
A Tide Line, a Cedar Stake, and Two Hundred Misplaced Parcels
The mistake dates back to a 1990s survey that set the Horry-Georgetown boundary using reference points on the Waccamaw River and the ocean side. State officials later determined the original markers didn't fully account for how tides shift a river's edge, which threw off the coordinates in a stretch of land near where U.S. 17 meets Kings Highway.
South Carolina's Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office caught the discrepancy in 2018 while reviewing county boundaries elsewhere in the state. What they found was that at least 199 parcels, containing homes, businesses, and vacant lots across roughly 210 acres in the Mount Gilead area, had been treated as Horry County property for decades when the actual statutory line placed them in Georgetown County. Residents had been voting in Horry elections, sending their kids to Horry schools, and paying Horry taxes on land that, on paper, belonged to a different county entirely.
State Representatives Russell Fry and Lee Hewitt, along with State Senator Stephen Goldfinch, took the problem to a community meeting at the Murrells Inlet Community Center. The fix wasn't simple, because South Carolina law doesn't let two counties just agree to redraw a line. It requires the people living on the disputed land to vote on which county they want. As Goldfinch put it at the time, "It's not fun, it's not cheap, but unfortunately, that's the way it is."
The Vote That Decided Which County People Already Lived In
Governor Henry McMaster issued an executive order setting a special referendum for November 5, 2019, open only to the roughly 250 registered voters in the affected parcels. The question on the ballot was long and, by lawmakers' own admission, easy to misread. A "yes" vote kept residents in Horry County. A "no" vote moved them into Georgetown, triggering new deeds, new tax accounts, and new school assignments.
At the community meeting ahead of the vote, Fry asked the crowd of about 100 people how many wanted to stay in Horry County. Nearly every hand went up. When he asked how many wanted to move to Georgetown, no one raised a hand. The referendum results matched that room: more than two-thirds of the votes cast favored annexation into Horry County.
That result still needed the General Assembly to make it official. Lawmakers passed enabling legislation and the Governor signed it, with the act ratified on April 8, 2020, adding Section 4-3-312 to the South Carolina Code of Laws. The Mount Gilead tract, all 210.32 acres of it, was formally transferred from Georgetown County to Horry County, six years ago. The people who thought they lived in Horry County finally, legally, did.
Why a Settled Line Still Isn't a Simple One
Here's the part that matters if you're shopping for a home in Murrells Inlet today rather than in 2019. The Mount Gilead correction closed one specific gap. It didn't erase the fact that Murrells Inlet, as a place, still straddles two counties. The community's northern edge sits in Horry County. The bulk of it, including the area south of that line, is in Georgetown County. ZIP code 29576, the one most listings use, covers parcels in both.
That's not a technicality. It changes which schools a specific address feeds into, which department responds to a fire call, and which office handles the tax bill. Two homes a few hundred yards apart, both listed as "Murrells Inlet," both sharing the same ZIP code, can answer to different school districts and different fire departments entirely.
| Horry County side | Georgetown County side | |
|---|---|---|
| School feeder pattern | St. James cluster (Seaside Elementary, St. James Intermediate, Middle, and High) | Waccamaw cluster |
| Assessor's office | Horry County Assessor | Georgetown County Assessor |
Fire and rescue coverage adds a third layer that doesn't even follow the county line cleanly. Murrells Inlet/Garden City Fire Rescue covers most of the community, including the Horry County edge, but Midway Fire Rescue takes over the stretch of Georgetown County closer to the city of Georgetown itself, roughly from the city limits north to Brookgreen Gardens. Two homes can share a county and still answer to different fire departments.
The Mount Gilead story is proof that these lines aren't drawn by nature. They're drawn by surveyors, recorded in statute, and occasionally drawn wrong for twenty years before anyone catches it. That's exactly why an address label or a ZIP code isn't enough evidence to compare two properties here.
What to Actually Check Before You Compare Two Murrells Inlet Homes
If you're weighing two listings in this area, the county assignment is worth confirming at the parcel level rather than assuming from the mailing address. A few practical steps:
Ask your agent to pull the parcel record directly from the Horry County Assessor or Georgetown County Assessor rather than relying on the listing's stated county. Confirm the specific elementary, middle, and high school assigned to that parcel, not just the general area, since the St. James and Waccamaw feeder patterns don't follow a straight line through town. Ask which fire and rescue department has jurisdiction, since that affects both response coverage and, in some cases, homeowners insurance underwriting. And don't assume that because two homes share a ZIP code, they'll see the same tax treatment or the same public services. James Sandefur, an attorney who moved his family from Murrells Inlet into Mount Gilead specifically so his children could attend Seaside Elementary, is a reminder that people make real decisions, sometimes a house-sized decision, based on which side of this line their front door sits.
A Few Direct Questions
Is Murrells Inlet in Horry County or Georgetown County? Both. The community straddles the boundary, with the northern edge in Horry County and the larger portion in Georgetown County. ZIP code 29576 covers parcels on both sides.
Could this happen again somewhere else along the Grand Strand? The state's own geodetic surveyor noted after the Mount Gilead correction that his office was working to verify county lines statewide ahead of the 2030 census, and that other boundaries around South Carolina still rely on decades-old, imprecise markers. It's a reasonable habit to verify rather than assume, wherever a property sits near a county line.
How do I find out which county my specific lot is in? The Horry County Assessor and Georgetown County Assessor both maintain parcel lookup tools tied to GIS mapping. A parcel number, not a street address alone, is the most reliable way to confirm.
If you're comparing homes on either side of this line, or anywhere else along the Grand Strand where the map is more complicated than the listing suggests, I'd rather walk you through the parcel details before you fall in love with a floor plan. That's the kind of groundwork that saves a headache later. Kristen Lundy is happy to help you sort it out. Let's Connect.
