How many times have you circled the 1.2-mile track at Diamond Lakes Regional Park without wondering why a walking loop in the middle of Hephzibah feels so oddly flat and fast, like it was built for something other than walking?
There's a reason for that. Before it was 286 acres of ball fields, fishing ponds, and tennis courts, this ground was the Augusta International Speedway, a half-mile oval that ran NASCAR Grand National Series races from 1962 to 1969. The track opened in 1960 and closed in 1970. When the county turned the site into a public park, it kept a piece of that history intact, folding the old road circuit into the park grounds along with a memorial marker that most people walk right past on their way to the fishing ponds. If you've done a lap here and never clocked the marker, you're not alone. Most residents haven't.
That gap between what's actually here and what people assume is here is worth closing, because it changes how the rest of a Barefields Saturday gets planned.
What Was Racing Ground Is Now Recreation Ground
The speedway era lasted a decade. Cars ran the half-mile oval as part of NASCAR's top series for seven of those years, then the track closed in 1970 and sat until the county repurposed the land. The three-mile road circuit that once ran alongside the oval got absorbed into what's now Diamond Lakes Regional Park, and the monument that marks the raceway's history still stands on the property today.
It's a strange thing to build a walking track over an old racetrack, but it explains the layout in a way generic park listings never mention. The site is big, flat, and open in a way that residential land in this part of Richmond County usually isn't, because it was graded for cars, not houses. That's why there's room for two full baseball and softball complexes, eight tennis courts, three basketball courts, and a campground, all inside one property boundary, without the park feeling cramped the way a lot of retrofitted rec centers do.
What The 286 Acres Hold Now
The park's official footprint, tracked through Augusta's own facilities listing, breaks down like this:
- Two five-field baseball and softball complexes
- Eight tennis courts and three outdoor basketball courts
- Five fishing ponds stocked with bass, catfish, and crappie, with boat rentals available (no swimming allowed, and no motorized boats or trolling motors on the water)
- A 1-mile walking track and a separate 1.2-mile loop, so you can pick your distance without doubling back
- A 25-site campground with full electric, water, and sewage hookups
- A community center and gymnasium that share a building with the public library
- A dog-friendly area for off-leash time
Spirit Creek runs along the park's southern edge, which is also why the ground stays green even in a dry August. None of this is unusual for a regional park on paper. What's unusual is how much of it sits on a footprint shaped by motorsport grading instead of typical park design, which is part of why the walking loops feel wide and uninterrupted compared to smaller neighborhood tracks nearby.
When The Ball Fields Fill Up, This Is Where Locals Go Instead
Diamond Lakes gets busy on tournament weekends. When both baseball complexes are running games and the parking lot fills past the ball fields, the quieter move isn't to fight for a spot on the walking track. It's to drive out Smokey Road to Spirit Creek Forest, a 725-acre state forest managed by the Georgia Forestry Commission that borders the same watershed.
Spirit Creek Forest carries a different history than Diamond Lakes. For years it ran active educational programs, hosting thousands of students annually to teach forest management and conservation. Those programs closed in 2010, and the site has settled into a quieter role since then: a working demonstration forest with hiking and biking trails through loblolly pine stands and bottomland hardwoods, open to geocaching except before 10 a.m. during turkey season, when hunters get priority. The adjoining 570-acre wildlife management area allows archery deer and turkey hunting along with small game, so it's worth checking the season calendar before you head out with a dog off leash.
There's no camping at Spirit Creek and no fishing pond to sit beside. What you get instead is space without a crowd, which on a weekend when Diamond Lakes is hosting a tournament is sometimes the entire point.
The Food Stops That Never Show Up On The Delivery Apps
After a morning at the ponds or the trails, the neighborhood's food options split into two categories: the chains that show up first on any delivery app search, and the spots that have actually been feeding Barefields for years.
Crab King has run as a takeout seafood market in Hephzibah since 2000, known locally for garlic crab and steamed shrimp prepared fresh in-house rather than trucked in. Baldinos, on Tobacco Road, posted a 94 in a recent round of county health inspections, a score that put it well ahead of some of the other south Augusta restaurants covered in the same roundup. For barbecue, Rolling Smoak BBQ & Grill and Big Oak BBQ both show up consistently in local reviews as the places residents actually return to, not just the ones that rank highest on a search results page.
None of these are new. That's the point. A neighborhood's real food scene usually isn't the newest opening, it's the handful of places that have quietly stayed open long enough to become part of the routine, the way Crab King has for a quarter century now.
A Saturday That Actually Uses Both Sides Of The Neighborhood
If you're building a weekend around what Barefields actually offers rather than what a generic city guide says it offers, the sequence looks something like this:
- Start early at Diamond Lakes if the ball fields are quiet, taking the 1.2-mile loop past the raceway monument before the heat sets in.
- If it's a tournament weekend and the lot is full, redirect to Spirit Creek Forest for a trail walk through the pine stands instead of fighting for parking.
- Swing by the ponds later in the day for an hour of fishing, since the five stocked ponds stay open even when the fields are packed.
- Close the day with takeout from Crab King or a plate from Rolling Smoak, both a short drive from most of the neighborhood's streets.
None of this is complicated. It just requires knowing that the park you drive past every day used to be a racetrack, and that the quiet alternative down Smokey Road exists for exactly the weekends when Diamond Lakes gets loud.
That's the thing about a neighborhood you've lived in for a while. The interesting parts aren't hidden, they're just sitting past the point where most people stop looking. The monument at Diamond Lakes has been there the whole time. So has the option to skip the crowd and drive out to Spirit Creek instead.
If you're ever curious what a Barefields address is actually worth in today's market, or you just want to talk through what's changing in the neighborhood, Lanorris Carey is easy to reach, and the free home valuation tool on her site takes about two minutes to run, no pressure attached.
