‘Waccamaw, Wac, Waccamaw:’ If you know the jingle, you’ll remember the company behind it

Adam Benson
·2 min read
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For Horry County natives of a certain age, seven syllables can send them into their youth.

“Waccamaw, Wac, Waccamaw,” was how Waccamaw Pottery’s ubiquitous radio and TV jingle began, along with its promise of home decor offering so vast, no other store on the East Coast could match it.

Between 1977 and 2001, Waccamaw Pottery anchored a commercial complex off U.S. Highway 501 just outside of Myrtle Beach that today is home to the Asher Theatre and NewSpring Church.

A full-page advertisement in Coast Magazine from 1985 gave visitors a sense of what to expect when they arrived.

“The store is fully air-conditioned for shopping comfort and two restaurants offer sustenance to dedicated shoppers who spend hours going up and down every aisle looking for bargains that are too good to pass up, it reads.

Waccamaw Pottery browsers can watch expert floral designers fashion arrangements from dried and silk flowers or catch the glasscutters engraving glassware with monograms or designs.”

A 1985 print ad for Waccamaw Pottery boasts of the store’s flexible hours and vast offerings.
A 1985 print ad for Waccamaw Pottery boasts of the store’s flexible hours and vast offerings.

At its peak, Waccamaw Pottery pulled in six million vistors annually and in 1983 was named the state’s most outstanding commercial attraction.

“The smell of the wicker and baskets is forever in my mind, and I can smell the memory when we drive by. So many good memories of hours spent there,” Tabitha Beeker recalled of her shopping trips.

Waccamaw Pottery was founded by George Bishop III, who graduated from Clemson University in 1952 with a with a ceramic engineering degree. Bishop moved his family from Columbia to Myrtle Beach in 1965.

The brand was so popular that Bishop would eventually open five Waccamaw Pottery locations between Myrtle Beach and Washington, D.C. through 1985.

Beyond the personal ties Waccamaw Pottery forged with its customers, the property symbolized a type of consumer behavior that’s largely vanished with the onset of internet sales.

For a time, it was America’s third-largest shopping complex with more than 100 stores over 750,000 square feet.

Unable to keep pace with its big name competitors, Waccamaw Pottery in the late 1990s merged with Northeastern HomePlace, which shuttered in the summer of 2001.

Even as tenants left and the one-time shopping mecca shriveled, it continued to make news, most notably as talks of a potential theme park for the site that circulated for years came to be in 2008 when the Hard Rock Theme Park opened.

It would last a year before being re-branded as Freestyle Music Park, which also failed and permanently closed in 2009.

A 2006 Toronto Star article profiling a traveling Christmas show by the Radio City Rockettes was reported from Myrtle Beach, where the troupe were using a former Waccamaw Pottery building for its rehearsals.

Waccamaw Pottery’s sprawling footprint and decorated history landed was described earlier this year by Underground Retail, a popular YouTube channel that focuses on defunct malls and other shopping centers.