During South Carolina's colonial and antebellum periods, the area now known as Surfside Beach was a large indigo plantation called the Ark, situated on the seaboard where the old Broad Road, later known as the King's Highway, forked and an alternate road turned right toward the seashore and the Long Bay Road. This road passed through the plantation, crossed the sand ridge and beach dunes, and reached the strand of Long Bay, while the Broad Road continued up the coast behind the sand dunes near present-day US Hwy. 17. Travelers heading north or south along the coastline often chose the Long Bay Road because it provided an excellent roadway, unlike the soft sandy inland route. On Jan. 2, 1740, the Rev. George Whitefield, traveling southward, praised the route for nearly twenty miles of beautiful bay and the sight of porpoises, and around 1773-1776 William Bartram stayed a night at Stephen Peak's while traveling northward and wrote of crossing the sand ridges to a hard sand beach paved with shells and exposed to the Atlantic for fifteen miles. In the mid-1920s, the Ark House became the Shady Side Inn, the first official hotel in what later became the Town of Surfside Beach. Set beyond the inner-most sand ridge and shaded by live oak trees hundreds of years old, it was remembered by Louise Chestnut Squires as a summer place where guests relaxed on large porches beneath Spanish moss while fox squirrels played in the branches. The inner-most sand ridge, which ran parallel to the beach dunes, helped protect the land behind it from hurricane tidal surges, but during the Great Hurricane of 1893, also known as the Flagg Storm, fishermen took refuge in the Ark House as ocean water swept the beach, rose over the sand ridge at the gateway, flooded the fields, and washed away fencing; holes were chopped in the floor so water could drain and the house would not be swept from its foundation.