COASTAL OBSERVER

Susan Shirley Duerk of Murrells Inlet recalled a day she spent with Maxine Oliver Hawkins and Roosevelt “Rooster” Pickett as they roasted, shucked and ate oysters by the campfire in the backyard of Oliver’s Lodge.

“They cooked the oysters and they lit heaters to the side that kept us warm. It’s a lot of history here,” she said.

Duerk reminisced about times she spent at one of the oldest restaurants in Murrells Inlet as she stood outside the chain-link fence that now surrounds the perimeter of the Oliver’s Lodge property that Belin Memorial United Methodist Church’s purchased for $2 million last week.

A fried shrimp basket was Duerk’s go-to on the menu at Oliver’s Lodge, meanwhile her late husband, Donnie, often left the restaurant with a pants pocket full of leftover hush puppies.

While everyone else went for fried seafood, Corinne Hoch, who grew up eating family meals there, went for the cheeseburgers and hush puppies but really had her young eyes set on the joggling board on the porch.

“You always felt like it was going to break any second because it went down so low, the more people you added to it,” Hoch said. “The food was good. You had a good view of the inlet, and the people were always nice.”

Oliver’s Lodge is the “keystone” of the whole inlet according to Chip Smith, an author who lives next door to the former restaurant. 

Oliver’s Lodge was built using lumber from Richmond Hill Plantation, now part of Wachesaw Plantation, and has stood along the waterfront since 1860. 

Smith writes in his book “A Pocket Wild: Notes from a Carolina Marsh” that Capt. Mack Oliver and his wife, Miss Teeny, ran the restaurant for decades. 

In 1891, the Oliver family bought the home and turned it into a hunting and fishing lodge. The house became a restaurant in 1910.

Maxine Oliver Hawkins, Oliver’s daughter, took over ownership until the early 1990s when she sold it to a couple who ran it for years. 

The restaurant closed in 2006.

“I felt like a knife had just been jabbed into my heart because I could not believe that the doors were not open,” Hoch said.

What once was a beloved restaurant in the community is now a makeshift shelter to feral cats, raccoons and squirrels.

Whether Oliver’s Lodge will be demolished depends on if the building can be preserved and relocated, says Paul Gardner, the church’s administrator. 

“None of those things have been finalized. It comes down to, can the building be saved?” he asked. “Another thought was, can it be moved?”

Gardner said the church hired a structural architect to issue an opinion on both of those questions that may be decided next month.

Belin officials have been working to acquire the property for about five years, he said. The acquisition of the property was the last contiguous piece of land available to the Belin campus, as the church owns the lot stretching from the creek to Business 17. 

“The timing got to be that it was right for the owners and right for us,” Gardner said. “We felt we could not pass it up if it was on the market.”

Belin made efforts beginning in 2017 to develop a strategic plan for the church’s campus. The cost of the project as a part of the strategic plan had nearly doubled in price to $15 million before the COVID pandemic hit. Those plans are shelved, Gardner said, and the church council is looking to assemble a team at tonight’s meeting to develop a new strategic plan.

“Their job is to look at private land use and what our immediate needs are and how to address those,” he said.

Oliver’s Lodge is not “historically contributing,” Gardner said, but that doesn’t diminish the folklore he has heard about the building such as prom dates to couples getting engaged at the restaurant.

Hoch, a member of the church and its centennial planning team, said she will support what the church decides to do with Oliver’s Lodge. She said she still has hope that Belin could utilize the building in some capacity but realizes it will take a lot of work to refurbish.

“Selfishly, I would like for it to be restored. I would hate to see anything happen to it,” she said. “I know that whatever decision is made will be made after a lot of thought.”

Smith said his main concern about Oliver’s Lodge is safety. The time to save the building, he said, has passed.

“Anybody who thinks that building can be saved just hasn’t looked at it,” he said. “This place, it was magical.”

Gardner agreed.

“It’s in really bad shape,” he said. “If this was a coat of paint or a new roof, that’d be one thing. But this is well beyond that.”

“It’s just not like it used to be. It was great growing up here,” Duerk added. “We didn’t realize what we had until it’s gone. It’s really grown up.”