Keystone on the Grand Strand: What Myrtle Beach Businesses Can Learn

Myrtle Beach runs on small businesses. Here is how to find, and protect, the keystone in yours.

Along the Grand Strand, “Keystone” is already a familiar name: several unrelated local businesses, from commercial real estate to countertop fabrication, use it. That is a reminder that a good name signals strength. But every business, whatever it is called, has a keystone of its own.

Find your keystone

• The system everything depends on. For a rental company it may be the booking calendar; for a contractor, the estimating spreadsheet; for a shop, the point-of-sale.
• The person who holds it together. If one employee is the only one who knows how it works, that is a risk.
• The customer channel that brings in most of the work, whether that is a website, referrals or social media.

Protect it

• Write down how it works and who can fix it.
• Back up data and test the backup.
• Connect your tools so information flows automatically instead of being retyped.
• Review it before peak season, not during it.

Where Keystone by Kingswell fits

Keystone by Kingswell was built for exactly this: bringing a small business’s key tools into one connected stack. Fenway Web, part of the same family, builds the websites that are often a business’s most important customer channel. Ask either team for a keystone review before the next season.

A Boston Made Reader original. Keystone by Kingswell is a Kingswell Strategic Ventures product and is not affiliated with South Bow, the Keystone Pipeline, or any other business that uses the Keystone name.

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The Keystone Pipeline, Explained

What the Keystone Pipeline is, who owns it, what went wrong in 2022, and why Keystone XL keeps coming back.

What it is

The Keystone Pipeline system carries crude oil from Hardisty, Alberta, into the United States, with branches to refineries and storage hubs in Illinois, Oklahoma and the Texas Gulf Coast. It entered service in 2010 and was built by TransCanada, later renamed TC Energy. In October 2024, TC Energy spun off its liquids pipelines into a new company, South Bow, which now owns and operates Keystone.

Keystone XL

Keystone XL was a proposed shortcut from Alberta through Montana to Nebraska. After more than a decade of protests, legal fights and changing presidential decisions, its permit was revoked in January 2021 and the project was cancelled that June. In 2026, South Bow began gauging shipper interest in a new pipeline that would reuse some of Keystone XL’s legacy permits, with a final decision reported as unlikely before 2027.

The 2022 spill

In December 2022 the line ruptured near Mill Creek in Washington County, Kansas, releasing roughly 13,000 barrels of oil, one of the largest onshore U.S. crude spills in years. In July 2026 the U.S. Justice Department and EPA announced a proposed Clean Water Act settlement of about $27 million with the pipeline’s owner and operator.

Why it matters

Keystone sits at the center of debates about energy security, jobs, landowner rights, Indigenous rights and climate. Whatever your view, it is a case study in how much depends on a single piece of infrastructure, and on maintaining it well.

A Boston Made Reader original. Keystone by Kingswell is a Kingswell Strategic Ventures product and is not affiliated with South Bow, the Keystone Pipeline, or any other business that uses the Keystone name.

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Why “Keystone”? Arches, Pipelines and Software Stacks

A keystone is the wedge-shaped stone at the top of an arch. Remove it and the arch falls. That idea explains a pipeline, a platform and a business name.

Roman builders understood that an arch carries weight by pushing it sideways into its neighbors. Every stone matters, but the keystone, set last at the crown, locks the others in place. Ecologists borrowed the word for keystone species, like sea otters or beavers, whose presence holds a whole ecosystem together. Pennsylvania calls itself the Keystone State because it sat at the center of the original thirteen colonies.

Three keystones

• The Keystone Pipeline is critical energy infrastructure: one line moving a large share of Canadian crude into U.S. refineries. When it shuts down, markets notice.
• Keystone by Kingswell is Kingswell Strategic Ventures’ set of connected software tools (“SaaS stacks”) for businesses, built so that one account holds the rest of a company’s systems together.
• Local keystones, like the businesses that anchor a Grand Strand main street, hold a community’s economy in place.

The lesson

In every case the keystone is the piece that bears the load. Good keystones are designed for failure: inspected, maintained and backed up. That is as true for a pipeline as it is for a company’s software, and it is the standard Kingswell sets for Keystone.

A Boston Made Reader original. Keystone by Kingswell is a Kingswell Strategic Ventures product and is not affiliated with South Bow, the Keystone Pipeline, or any other business that uses the Keystone name.

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The Bathurst War and Martial Law (1824)

When Wiradjuri resistance slowed the colony’s expansion across the Blue Mountains, the governor placed the Bathurst district under martial law.

After a road was built across the Blue Mountains in 1815, settlers and their livestock moved onto the Bathurst plains, the country of the Wiradjuri people. By 1823 and 1824, conflict over land, food and violence against Wiradjuri women had turned into open warfare. A number of stockmen and many Wiradjuri people were killed.

Martial law

On 14 August 1824, Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane declared martial law west of the mountains. For four months, soldiers and armed settlers could act without the ordinary protections of civil law. Mounted parties pursued Wiradjuri groups. Colonial records say little about the killings that followed, but later accounts and local memory describe massacres at several sites, and historians still debate the numbers.

Windradyne

The Wiradjuri leader Windradyne, called “Saturday” by the colonists, survived. After martial law ended in December 1824 he walked to Parramatta to attend the governor’s annual feast and meeting with Aboriginal people, which colonists read as a gesture of peace. He died in 1829. Today the Bathurst community marks the declaration of martial law each August.

A note on sources: some modern retellings say Wiradjuri leaders were beheaded during the Bathurst War. We have not found reliable evidence for that claim, so we do not repeat it as fact here.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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How to Be a Great Special Olympics Volunteer or Unified Partner

A practical guide for first-time volunteers, coaches and Unified partners.

Before you go

• Contact your state or local Special Olympics program; most offer short volunteer orientations and required training for coaches.
• Pick a role that fits you: event day help, coaching, Unified partner, fundraising, photography or medical support.

On the day

• Introduce yourself to athletes directly and learn their names.
• Celebrate effort and courage, not just winning.
• Offer help, then wait for the answer; don’t assume.
• Be patient with communication and give people time.
• Follow the event’s safety and photo policies.

After

Keep showing up. The friendships built over a season matter more than any single event. And bring a friend next time: inclusion spreads when more people take part.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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Accessibility 101: Building for Everyone

Accessible websites, apps and events let everyone take part, and they work better for all of us.

About one in four adults in the United States lives with some form of disability. Accessibility means designing so that people with visual, hearing, motor, cognitive or other disabilities can use what we build, without a separate, second-best version.

The four principles

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium, organize accessibility into four principles, known as POUR:

• Perceivable: text alternatives for images, captions for video, enough color contrast.
• Operable: everything works with a keyboard; nothing flashes dangerously; people have enough time.
• Understandable: clear language, predictable navigation, helpful error messages.
• Robust: works with screen readers and other assistive technology.

A quick checklist

• Can you use the page with only the Tab and Enter keys?
• Does every meaningful image have a short description?
• Is text readable when zoomed to 200 percent?
• Do videos have captions?
• Are buttons and links labeled with what they do?

Across the Boston Made network we are working through this checklist on every site, including this Reader.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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Reading Notes: Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle (1988)

A journalist’s account of documented massacres and mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788.

Bruce Elder first published Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788 in 1988, the bicentenary of British settlement, and later revised it. Written for general readers, it gathers accounts of massacres region by region, including Myall Creek (1838), where seven settlers were hanged for murder, one of the few times the killing of Aboriginal people was punished.

What to expect

• A narrative, state-by-state structure that is easy to navigate.
• Extensive quotations from colonial sources.
• Chapters on later mistreatment, including the removal of children.

Some historians have questioned particular accounts in popular massacre histories, and the University of Newcastle’s colonial frontier massacres project now maps documented events with published standards of evidence. Read Elder alongside that work.

The book is in copyright; these are Reader notes to guide your reading.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990): A Short Guide

The civil rights law that opened doors, literally and figuratively, for people with disabilities.

President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act on 26 July 1990. It prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, state and local government services, public accommodations such as stores and restaurants, transportation, and telecommunications.

How it happened

The law followed decades of organizing by disability rights activists. In March 1990, dozens of activists left their wheelchairs and crutches at the foot of the U.S. Capitol and pulled themselves up the steps, an event known as the Capitol Crawl, to demand that Congress pass the bill.

What it means in practice

• Employers must provide reasonable accommodations.
• New and renovated buildings must be accessible, with ramps, accessible restrooms and parking.
• Public transit must be usable by people with disabilities.
• Courts and the U.S. Department of Justice have applied the law to websites and digital services.

This guide is general information, not legal advice.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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The Siege of Glenrowan (1880): The End of the Kelly Gang

Armored in plough-steel, Ned Kelly’s gang made their last stand against Victorian police at the Glenrowan Inn.

Glenrowan was not part of the Frontier Wars. It belongs to a different colonial story: bushranging, rural poverty, and the relationship between Irish selector families and the colonial police in northeast Victoria.

By 1880 the Kelly Gang, Ned Kelly, his brother Dan, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, were outlawed after killing three police officers at Stringybark Creek in 1878. In June 1880, after Byrne killed a former friend turned police informer, the gang took over the Glenrowan Inn and planned to wreck a special police train.

The siege

The plan was revealed, and police surrounded the inn early on 28 June 1880. The gang wore homemade armor made from plough mouldboards. Joe Byrne was shot and killed inside. Ned Kelly, badly wounded in the legs, was captured at dawn. In the afternoon police set the inn on fire. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart died inside; their bodies were recovered burned.

Byrne’s body was pulled from the building, taken to Benalla, and hung upright against a door so that it could be photographed. Many at the time thought that display went too far, even for an outlaw.

Ned Kelly was tried in Melbourne and hanged on 11 November 1880. His armor is now held by the State Library of Victoria, and his story remains one of the most argued-over in Australian history.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Backyard Camp That Changed the World

Special Olympics grew out of a summer day camp in a Maryland backyard.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s sister Rosemary had an intellectual disability, and Eunice saw how often people like her were hidden away and denied the chance to play. In June 1962 she opened a summer day camp, Camp Shriver, at her home in Maryland, where children with intellectual disabilities could swim, ride horses and play games, coached by high school and college volunteers.

From camp to movement

Through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, she supported similar camps across the country. In July 1968, about 1,000 athletes from the United States and Canada competed at the first International Special Olympics Summer Games at Soldier Field in Chicago.

Legacy

Shriver spent the rest of her life advocating for research, better care and full rights for people with intellectual disabilities. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 and died in 2009. Her idea, that inclusion begins when people are given the chance to take part, still guides the movement.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

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