Frankenstein’s Highway: How West Virginia convinced Myrtle Beach it needed I-73
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Frankenstein’s Highway
Interstate 73, the fabled Michigan-to-Myrtle Beach superhighway, has been in the works for more than 40 years. In this latest investigative series by The Sun News, J. Dale Shoemaker takes a deep-dive into the origins of the project, why it’s taken so long to complete and what the road could mean for South Carolina.
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Frankenstein’s Highway: How West Virginia convinced Myrtle Beach it needed I-73
Frankenstein’s Highway: How Myrtle Beach is still trying to will I-73 into existence
Frankenstein’s Highway: Will I-73 boost SC, or merely import mediocre jobs?
Frankenstein’s Highway: Hundreds have made money off of I-73. See the data for yourself
More than a century ago, K.A. Ammar’s grandfather immigrated from Syria to West Virginia, seeking a piece of the American Dream.
Coal production was booming in the early 20th century, and he sold wares from a pushcart in the state’s coal towns, like Bluefield. The enterprise would eventually become the chain of Magic Mart department stores that his grandson ran until 2018.
But outside of West Virginia, Ammar has a far grander legacy: Interstate 73.
No, he never worked as an engineer. And no, Ammar was never a politician. He was merely a department store owner who wanted to build a highway.
If South Carolina ever constructs its portion of I-73 — from I-95 near Latta to Myrtle Beach — it’ll have Ammar to thank.
That alone makes I-73 unique among every other interstate highway project the United States has built since the Eisenhower administration.
In fact, if Dwight Eisenhower knew its story, he might be spinning in his grave.
Rather than the federal government planning the road and footing 90% of the bill, as has been the case for almost all interstates since the 1950s, I-73 has been planned by an evolving cast of unlikely characters:
Ammar and an engineering professor from West Virginia; a gregarious business promoter; and a revolving door of rank-and-file congressmen, lobbyists, state lawmakers and government officials are all part of the story.
All the while, Washington has hardly touched the project.
Indeed, I-73 sometimes feels more like myth than reality.
Backers of the long-sought Michigan-to-Myrtle Beach freeway have promised it will boost the economic fortunes of every community along its route, from port cities to rust belt towns, and former coal mining hubs to getaway destinations.
In reality, I-73 has taken decades to build, and the only drivable portion of the road today exists in central North Carolina.
Meanwhile, Michigan and Ohio have largely shrugged at the project. West Virginia has gone off on its own.
Virginia has long planned to build I-73, but hasn’t. South Carolina also wants to, but hasn’t yet.
That’s left I-73 as a collection of parts.
If it’s ever fully built, I-73 will resemble something closer to Frankenstein’s monster than the “broader ribbons” Eisenhower envisioned for the nation’s interstates. That’s because, today, the highway looks more like an assortment of arms and legs than a unified highway.
Taken together, those conditions raise the multi-billion dollar question: Will this interstate ever get fully built?
South Carolina could allocate $300 million this year for I-73 construction, making the project a reality in the state. State and local officials alike hope jump-starting the highway’s construction will convince the federal government to ultimately pay for 27% of the overall cost.
But that raises an even bigger question: Is it even possible to construct such a highway without the federal government paying most of the bill?
At this point, as South Carolina lawmakers haggle in Columbia, I-73 remains just a dream.
‘The wisdom of broader ribbons’
In the 1950s, Eisenhower learned an important lesson: If he wanted the United States to have a system of interstate highways, the federal government had to foot the bill.
He brought that program to life by 1956, and it continued into the 1990s.
It’s against that backdrop that a pair of 1980s visionaries — Ammar and former Bluefield State College professor John Sage — seem especially bold.
The pair wanted to build a new highway in West Virginia, namely U.S. 52.
“We have a really depressed economic system with the coal economy going down (and) a really miserable road,” Sage told The Sun News. “It was my do-good social economic project for West Virginia.”
In Sage’s part of West Virginia, mountaintop removal flattened parts of the Appalachian mountains as the coal industry searched for new ways to extract seams of coal.
Beneath one such former mountaintop ran U.S. 52, a main thoroughfare through West Virginia. Its tight turns made it a dangerous drive.
Bluefield — among the Appalachian cities that lost more than half of its population as the coal industry declined — sat along its route.
From 1978 to 1982, local business leaders and the Bluefield Chamber of Commerce led a campaign to get West Virginia to fix U.S. 52 from Bluefield to Huntington.
State leaders initially said yes, but dropped the plan when interest rates rose too high.
Ammar was put in charge of the U.S. 52 effort and was looking for ways to bring the project back to life.
Together, he and Sage came up with what they thought was the perfect solution: Replace U.S. 52 with a new interstate highway and install windmills along its route on top of the flattened mountains.
West Virginia could revitalize its small cities and move away from coal-powered electricity in one stroke, they thought.
U.S. 52 ran from Detroit to Charleston, so they could link the cities with a new interstate.
Myrtle Beach buys into the dream
By the late 1980s, that dream reached Myrtle Beach.
The project found champions in former U.S. Rep. John Napier, who represented Myrtle Beach in the 1980s, and Ashby Ward, the larger-than-life leader of the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce from 1974 to 2003.
Long before the 1-73 proposal, Napier and Ward were thinking about an interstate. Napier had noticed in the 1980s that the region’s highways were traffic-prone. Ward suggested he push for an interstate highway in Washington.
Napier convinced Ronald Reagan to fund early studies of a new interstate that would run through Myrtle Beach.
Ward, who had built the Grand Strand’s chamber into a juggernaut, would go on to use his perch to broadcast the idea to locals and lobby government officials at all levels. If I-73 could boost West Virginia, it could boost Myrtle Beach too, Ward reasoned.
An economy centered on low-wage tourism jobs can be extremely fragile, as the COVID-19 pandemic made many in Myrtle Beach realize.
Ammar, Ward and Sage were successful in convincing generations of politicians to spend their time and political capital on the I-73 dream, even if they and many of the politicians wouldn’t live to drive the road.
Ward died in 2003. Ammar died in 2020. Sage, in a November interview, said he was terminally ill.
In its 1991 highway bill, Congress designated I-73 a “high priority” future highway. But it declined to fund the project. Eisenhower’s interstate program officially ended in 1992.
“We had to do a lot of horse trading to get it done,” former U.S. Rep. Henry Brown, who previously represented Horry County, said in an interview with The Sun News.
“I kind of dedicated my term in office to remedy some of the shortfalls in Myrtle Beach.”
That’s when the political scheming began, at nearly every level of government, according to a review of newspaper archives.
By March 1994, the Roanoke Times reported that three Virginia counties were lobbying to have I-73 run through their territory. Montgomery County and the city of Blacksburg, meanwhile, were busy lobbying to keep I-73 out.
Sage, to this day, still blames Roanoke, Va., for “hijacking” I-73’s route through the state.
By month’s end, the newspaper reported that Virginia’s preferred route didn’t jive with North Carolina’s. That November, the Wilmington Star-News noted that North Carolina’s preferred route didn’t jive with South Carolina’s.
By 1995, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond was incensed by North Carolina’s politicking. That dispute led to North Carolina building both I-73 and Interstate 74.
Still, for Ward and other Horry officials, I-73 was going to be the Grand Strand’s savior.
South Carolina’s fastest-growing county needed more than service workers, real estate agents and construction workers.
“It was his biggest goal at the time, …and he always talked about how there was no straight shot to the beach,” said Judy Ward Califano, one of Ward’s children.
“That was the one thing he wanted to do before he died,” she said. “It was his passion.”
Ashby Ward tries to build a highway
Looking back, Ward is probably more responsible for turning Myrtle Beach into what it is today than the developers who built its hotels and the business owners who run its restaurants, clubs and golf courses.
As the area’s chief booster and advertiser for three decades, Ward’s the one who transformed the Grand Strand from a sleepy beach town only South Carolinians knew to the tourism behemoth it is today.
He’s also the main reason anyone here even knows what I-73 is.
And he knew how politics worked.
“Ashby Ward … was like God to the politicians,” said Horry County Council member Harold Worley, who opposed I-73 in decades past, but supports it now if the federal government helps pay for it. “If you didn’t have Ashby’s blessings, you didn’t win.”
Wielding that influence, it’s largely thanks to Ward that Horry politicians have been convinced to pursue the project for decades.
Born in Florence County during the Great Depression, Ward grew up wanting to be a radio announcer, his brother, McCoy Ward, said.
Ward began his television career at WBTW in Florence, where he hosted an afternoon kids-entertainment and cartoon program called “Captain Ashby,” silver spacesuit and all.
After his children’s show, Ward worked as both a television news anchor and PR professional before landing at the Myrtle Beach chamber in 1974.
As the journalist Will Moredock noted in his 2003 book, “Banana Republic: A Year in the Heart of Myrtle Beach,” Ward was an important megaphone for developers as they built some of their most memorable tourist attractions, including Broadway at the Beach and Barefoot Landing.
Under his leadership, Moredock wrote, the Myrtle Beach chamber became “a juggernaut of commerce and promotion,” growing to become the second-largest chamber in the Southeast by the turn of the century.
That legacy continues today, as the chamber is one of the biggest political players in the region.
In 1997, as I-73’s momentum was dying, Ward tried to revive it.
That September, he joined the “men from Bluefield” in the nation’s capital for a two-day lobbying sprint.
“We’ve got to keep it alive,” Ward told The Sun News at the time. “One of these days, they’ll find a way to spend that money they’re sitting on, and maybe we can get some of it.”
During the early months of 1998, Reps. Mark Sanford and Jim Clyburn bickered publicly over where I-73 should start — Myrtle Beach or Charleston.
They eventually settled on Myrtle Beach, but that’s all the progress the project would see in South Carolina that year. In fact, the chairman of the S.C. Department of Transportation sounded the project’s death knell as the congressmen argued.
“There’s no funding available in South Carolina,” the late H.B. “Buck” Limehouse said at the time. “As far as we’re concerned, the project is on hold indefinitely.”
That “indefinite hold” lasted until 2003.
That’s when Congress allocated $3 million for a feasibility and environmental study, The Sun News previously reported.
That allocation emboldened Rep. Brown to announce he’d push for $1 billion to build I-73 in South Carolina.
Ward was over the moon.
“I think it’s wonderful; it’s wonderful that they would even consider going ahead with the whole project,” he told The Sun News in February 2003.
He died two months later, in April 2003. Local politicians voted to name the eventual I-73 after him.
Brad Dean was named as Ward’s replacement, and he took up the I-73 cause in his honor.
By 2006, Dean’s Chamber would take over full control of the lobbying effort for the highway, pumping its money into boosting the project.
The dream born in coal country had found a home at the beach.
“If I-73 was important enough for John Napier, Strom Thurmond, Reagan and Ashby Ward to support it,” Dean said to The Sun News, “then I was going to join the team.”
Ward’s legacy would live to see another day.
How we reported this story: Over the course of six months, The Sun News interviewed more than two dozen people knowledgeable about I-73, its history and the U.S. interstate highway system. They included current and former members of Congress, current and former South Carolina and Horry County officials, area business leaders and others. The Sun News also reviewed legal documents and data from the South Carolina Department of Transportation, and conducted an extensive review of newspaper archives spanning three decades. Contemporaneous reporting from The Columbus Dispatch, The Roanoke Times, The Post & Courier, The Associated Press and The Sun News, among other outlets, from 1991 through 2019 was included in that review. Those sources, woven together, create the most comprehensive history of South Carolina’s newest interstate highway to date.
J. Dale Shoemaker researched, reported and wrote this project. Charles “Steve” Austin and David Weissman edited the project. Jason Lee captured original photos and videos and Gabby McCall created the graphics. Loumay Alesali produced this project’s video.
This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Frankenstein’s Highway: How West Virginia convinced Myrtle Beach it needed I-73."
