This Myrtle Beach park will become an outdoor museum, tribute to teen who died in 1968

On a crisp fall afternoon, Linda Holloman gently tugged on a ripening crab apple perched from a tree in Behulah Bathsheba Bowens Park in the Harlem community.

The tree provided shade, but the expanse of green space on Nance Street — named for a community member who died 54 years ago — meant more.

“I used to have a little daycare, and I used to bring my kids to come and play in this park,” she said.

For Holloman and other long-time residents of this part of the city, the park is a living tribute to a young woman admired for her patience, golden voice and leadership.

Bowens — known as “Sheba” to friends and family — died suddenly in February 1968, just two months after turning 16. The park was created several years later by Sandy Grove Missionary Baptist Church and is now managed by the city.

One of its key features are interpretive signs along the perimeter giving visitors insight into some of the community’s prominent residents and native vegetation — many of which were used in home remedies. Most are now covered in grime and almost unreadable, but a $9,675 T-Mobile Hometown Grant will cover costs to install 24 new ones — an outdoor museum of sorts.

Myrtle Beach-area natives such as Hollomon and Thurmond Hemingway offered oral histories for the project.

“We all became a family within this whole community,” Hemingway said during an event Friday marking the park’s planned upgrade. “It was a pleasure, a joy to learn from them.”

Kutura Bowens-Lynch was 9 years old when her older sister died.

For many children in the area, it was their first experience with death of someone their same age.

Her death was sudden, and she was very well-known within the Harlem community as a tutor and active member of her church.

“It’s just like it was yesterday. And anybody that knew her that I have spoken with, I always get the same response,” Bowens-Lynch said. “That she was such a sweet soul. Such a beautiful person. And I believe that.”

Myrtle Beach is one of 25 cities nationwide to get money through T-Mobile’s latest round of funding. Securing the grant was a personal endeavor for Cookie Goings, a close friend of Bowens-Lynch.

They graduated together from Myrtle Beach High School in 1978 and spent a lot of time at each other’s homes.

“Bathsheba Bowens Park is so special to so many of us. And as a true native and with this being my neighborhood, it means even more,” Goings said. “What it is is a history lesson.”

Goings hopes more community events will come to the park and spur interest in visitors and residents alike about other assets within the city that aren’t as well known.

“It is one of many hidden gems within our city, but it takes each of these little pieces of the puzzle to make the whole of Myrtle Beach more,” she said.