Matthews NC Parks: 21 Listed, 12 You Can Visit

If you have been looking at Matthews for a move, you have probably pulled up a park map or a “best parks” list and counted somewhere between 10 and 16 of them. That count is not wrong, exactly. Mecklenburg County’s own park dataset, the one behind the county’s public Find Parks map, holds 21 separate park records inside Matthews. What the count hides is that only 12 of those 21 are places you can actually visit, and four of those twelve have no parking recorded at all. I pulled the county’s records on Monday, September 28, 2026, and three of the 21 come back with a status of “Undeveloped” and operating hours of “Non-Operational”: zero recorded amenities, zero parking spaces, 35.6 acres of open ground between them.

So here is the ranked version of the Matthews park list, built from what the county records for each park rather than from opinion. You will get the 12 you can walk into in order of how many amenities the county has on file, the three that are bare land, the five records that turn out not to be parks at all, the one park the county has entered twice under two different addresses, and the large park everybody calls a Matthews park that the county files under Charlotte. At the end, the two minute check that tells you which is which before you load the car.

17 min read | Living in South Charlotte

What This Story Covers

• How many Matthews NC parks there are, and how many are open
• The 12 Matthews NC parks you can walk into, ranked
• Three are recorded as bare land
• Five of the records are not parks
• Why does Purser-Hulsey Park show up twice?
• Which greenways reach Matthews town limits?
• The big park everyone calls a Matthews park
• How do you check a park before you drive there?
• Frequently asked questions
• About the author
• How we sourced this

How many Matthews NC parks there are, and how many are open

Mecklenburg County lists 21 park records inside Matthews, and 12 of them are parks you can visit today. That gap is the whole story, and it breaks down cleanly once you read the status field on each record instead of just counting rows.

The 12 Matthews NC parks you can walk into, ranked by the number of amenities Mecklenburg County records for each, counting only real amenities and not the parking, ADA or reservable-facility flags, with acreage from the county’s park boundary layer. Records read September 28, 2026.

The 12 Matthews NC parks you can walk into, ranked by the number of amenities Mecklenburg County records for each, counting only real amenities and not the parking, ADA or reservable-facility flags, with acreage from the county’s park boundary layer. Records read September 28, 2026.

Rank and park	Recorded amenities	Acres	Parking spaces	Operator on the record
1. Squirrel Lake Park	10	34.45	33	Matthews
2. Mecklenburg County Regional Sportsplex	9	156.34	1,232	Mecklenburg County
3. Matthews-Sardis Park	7	2.95	10	Matthews
3. Stumptown Park	7	2.49	30	Matthews
5. Windsor Park	6	4.60	50	Matthews
6. Baucom Park	5	0.82	3	Matthews
7. Purser-Hulsey Park	4 across two records	91.43 and 2.72	35 across two records	Matthews
7. Rice Park	4	9.53	20	Matthews
9. Country Place Park	2	0.27	0	Matthews
9. KP Park	2	no boundary record	0	Matthews
11. Fountain Rock Park	1	no boundary record	0	Matthews
11. Town Green Park	1	0.44	0	Matthews

A word on what this ranking is and is not. It measures what Mecklenburg County has written down about each park, which is not the same thing as how good a park is. A half acre green in the middle of downtown with one gazebo on its record can be the best twenty minutes of somebody’s Saturday, and the county’s file will never show that. What the ranking is good for is the thing a list of names cannot do: it tells you, before you drive, whether there is a bathroom, whether there is anywhere to leave the car, and whether there is anything built on the site at all.

The 12 Matthews NC parks you can walk into, ranked

The top two records are 10 amenities and 9, and they are nothing alike. The Mecklenburg County Regional Sportsplex on Sports Parkway is 156.34 acres with 1,232 parking spaces, which is more parking than every other park in Matthews put together and several times over. It is a county facility rather than a town one, its hours are recorded only as “Varies”, and its amenity list reads like a tournament venue: multi-purpose fields, a playground, walking trails, greenway access, a shelter, restrooms, meeting space and a concession stand. If your weekend involves a travel team, this is the address you will come to know.

Squirrel Lake Park at 1631 Pleasant Plains Road is the one to know if you want a park rather than a venue. It records more amenities than the Sportsplex does, on about a fifth of the footprint, 34.45 acres by the county’s boundary polygon. Sixteen amenities in the Matthews count appear on exactly one record, and Squirrel Lake holds three of them: fishing, a dock or pier, and disc golf.

Add a playground with swings, walking trails, greenway access, picnic tables, a shelter, a restroom and 33 parking spaces, and it is the most complete single park in town by a clear margin. One note on its size: the Town of Matthews has published 36 acres for it, so treat the county’s 34.45 as the polygon measurement rather than the last word.

Then a tie at 7, and Windsor Park just behind it at 6. Windsor Park off Northeast Parkway is 4.60 acres with 50 parking spaces, the second largest parking count among the twelve you can visit, so you will usually find room on a Saturday, and it adds a playground, swings, trails, picnic tables, a shelter and a restroom.

Matthews-Sardis Park at 9650 Sardis Road runs 2.95 acres with the same core set and an open lawn, though only 10 spaces. Stumptown Park at 120 South Trade Street is the downtown one, 2.49 acres, and its list is the odd one out: a playground, volleyball, picnic tables, a restroom, 30 spaces, an interpretive exhibit and an amphitheater, one of the two amphitheaters on a Matthews park record; the Matthews Community Center carries the other. That last item is why the town’s event calendar lives there.

Baucom Park on Sadie Drive takes sixth with 5 amenities on 0.82 acres, and it comes with a catch worth knowing: 3 parking spaces. Three. It has a playground, swings, trails, a shelter and an open lawn, and it is effectively a walk-to park for the streets around it. Rice Park at 2540 Rice Road ties Purser-Hulsey for seventh with 4, on a comparatively large 9.53 acres, with a playground, swings, trails, picnic tables and 20 spaces, and no restroom on file.

The bottom four are small by design and you should read them as public spaces rather than destinations. Country Place Park on South Trade Street is 0.27 acres with picnic tables and a botanical garden. KP Park on East Matthews Street carries a botanical garden and a shade structure. Fountain Rock Park on South Trade Street has one thing on its record, greenway access, which makes it a trailhead more than a park. Town Green Park on Matthews Station Street has one gazebo on 0.44 acres. None of those four has a single parking space on file, which tells you exactly how they are meant to be reached.

Three are recorded as bare land

Three of the 21 records carry a status of “Undeveloped” and operating hours of “Non-Operational”, and between them they hold 35.6 acres. Williams-Olmstead Park at 1738 Weddington Road is the largest at 16.97 acres, recorded as a neighborhood park managed by Mecklenburg County. Independence Pointe Park on Independence Pointe Parkway is 11.42 acres and is the town’s, with a service date on the record of July 11, 2003. Gander Cove Park at 10502 Monroe Road is 7.21 acres, also the county’s. All three come back with no amenities on file and no parking spaces.

Here is why this matters more than a data curiosity, and it is the part I would want to know as a buyer. All three of them show up in Google as an operational park. I checked each one against the Google Places API the same day I pulled the county records, and Independence Pointe Park, Gander Cove Park and Williams-Olmstead Park each return as a place of type “park” with a business status of “OPERATIONAL”. So a search for parks near a house you are considering will hand you three addresses where the county’s own record says there is nothing built.

What that establishes, and what it does not: the county records these three as undeveloped as of the last time it edited those rows, which was May 23, 2025 for the two county sites and November 18, 2024 for the town one. It does not establish that nothing is planned, and it does not establish that no work has started since. A published status that has not been revisited in over a year is a reason to check rather than a reason to conclude. What it does mean is that the ranked list above is the count of what is open, and 21 is not.

Five of the records are not parks

Five of the 18 developed records are real, open, useful places that are not parks, and if you are counting parks you should take them out. Matthews Community Center at 100 East McDowell Street sits on 1.48 acres with 114 parking spaces, a restroom, meeting space, an amphitheater and an interpretive and historical feature on its record, and its hours field says to check the website. McDowell Arts Center next door at 123 East McDowell Street is recorded with a restroom and arts programming and no parking of its own. Crews Recreation Center at 1201 Crews Road has a gymnasium, basketball, a restroom and 157 spaces on 3.86 acres.

Fullwood Community Garden on Covenant Church Lane is 1.08 acres with 10 parking spaces and a community garden on file, which is what it says on the tin.

The fifth is the one that would trip you up: Butler High School Tennis Courts at 1810 Matthews-Mint Hill Road is typed on the county’s record as a “Town Park”, with tennis and 300 parking spaces. It is a public record of courts at a high school, and it is the only tennis on any Matthews park record. Whether you can use it on a given afternoon depends on the school, not the town, so treat the record as telling you the courts exist rather than telling you they are open to you.

None of this is a complaint about the county’s file. A parks and recreation department reasonably keeps its recreation centers, its arts center and its community garden in the same dataset as its parks, because it operates all of them. The trouble starts downstream, when a list site counts the rows and publishes the total as a park count. That is how a town with 12 walkable parks ends up described as having 16.

Why does Purser-Hulsey Park show up twice?

Because the county has two records for it, at two addresses, and each one holds a different half of the park. The first sits at 3024 Matthews-Mint Hill Road and carries the dog park and 20 parking spaces, and nothing else. The second sits at 13201 Phillips Road and carries walking trails, mountain biking and a community garden with 15 spaces, and no dog park. The two points are about 1,570 feet apart, so roughly a third of a mile. On the county’s separate boundary layer there are likewise two Purser-Hulsey polygons, one at 91.43 acres typed as a regional park and one at 2.72 acres typed as a town park.

The practical consequence is the one that would cost you a trip. If you look up Purser-Hulsey Park hoping to take a dog, and you land on the Phillips Road record, the dog park is not on it. If you look it up hoping to ride, and you land on the Matthews-Mint Hill Road record, the mountain bike trails are not on it. Neither record shows you the whole park. Google, for what it is worth, resolves the name to a single park at the Phillips Road address, which is the larger of the two and the one with the trails.

I am not going to tell you the county made a mistake here, because I cannot see the intent behind two rows and there are ordinary reasons a parks department would record two access points separately. What I can tell you is what the records show, which is two entries under one name splitting one park’s amenities between them, and that the combined 4 amenities across the two is what puts Purser-Hulsey level with Rice at seventh rather than higher. Read both records, or just go to Phillips Road, which is where the trails are.

The Purser-Hulsey split is the kind of thing I would not have found by walking the park, and it is the reason I read the records rather than the roundups. Every list of Matthews parks I checked before pulling the county’s file gets the names roughly right and then stops. Not one of them separates a park with a playground and a bathroom from 17 acres of open ground with a park name attached to it, and that is the single distinction a person deciding where to live needs most from a park list.

Which greenways reach Matthews town limits?

Five named active greenways touch the Matthews town line, and two that get named alongside them do not. I ran the county’s greenway layer against the town boundary polygon rather than a bounding box, which matters, because a box drawn around Matthews catches paths in Charlotte and Mint Hill that never cross into town. Inside the town line the layer returns 174 segments carrying five active named trails: Four Mile Creek Greenway, which is the longest and the one most people mean, plus Four Mile Creek Tributary Greenway, Irvins Creek Greenway, Heritage Trail and Four Mile Creek Urban Trail. Four Heritage Trail segments, 0.25 miles between them, are recorded as inactive.

McAlpine Creek Greenway and Campbell Creek Greenway both sit close enough that they show up in a wider search around Matthews, and neither crosses the town limits. That is not a knock on either one, and if you buy on the Charlotte side of the line you may well use McAlpine more than any greenway inside the town line. It is simply worth knowing which of the paths in a listing description are inside the town you are paying town taxes to.

Three of the 12 parks have greenway access on their record: the Sportsplex, Squirrel Lake Park and Fountain Rock Park. Fountain Rock is the interesting one, because greenway access is the only thing on its record. Treat it as the way onto Four Mile Creek rather than as a park you spend an afternoon in. If the greenway network is what sells you on Matthews, and for a lot of buyers it is, the town’s wider push on walking is a bigger story than the parks themselves, and we covered that in how Matthews is rebuilding itself for people on foot.

The big park everyone calls a Matthews park

Colonel Francis J. Beatty Park is the largest park most people associate with Matthews, it has a lake and two playgrounds, and it is not in the county’s Matthews list. The county’s own record puts it at 4330 Weddington Road with a city value of Charlotte, typed as a regional park and operated by Mecklenburg County. Google addresses it as Matthews, NC 28105. TripAdvisor ranks it as a Matthews park. The county files it under Charlotte.

Both things are true at once, which is the normal condition of any address near the Matthews line. A place can have a Matthews mailing address and sit outside Matthews town limits, and this is the single most expensive piece of confusion in the whole Matthews market, because it decides your taxes, your schools and your trash pickup rather than just which park list a lake shows up on. We took that apart properly in what Matthews NC costs you, and the same trap catches whole neighborhoods, not just parks: Sardis Forest is a Charlotte neighborhood, not Matthews.

For the purposes of the ranking above I have followed the county’s city value, because that is the field the dataset is organized by and the alternative is drawing my own line around the town. So Beatty is not ranked above, and you should absolutely still go, because it is one of the better parks in the area. Just do not count it when you are working out what the Town of Matthews itself provides.

How do you check a park before you drive there?

You can rerun everything above in about two minutes per park, and it is worth doing, because the county edits these records on its own schedule and a status can move. Here is the order I would use.

Start on the county’s Find Parks map, which is the public face of the dataset behind this article, and click the park itself rather than reading a list. Read three fields in this order: the status, the operating hours and the parking count. A status of “Undeveloped” or hours of “Non-Operational” is your answer and you can stop there. Zero parking spaces does not mean closed, it means you are walking or parking on a street, which for the four smallest parks in the ranking is the intended design.

Then check the amenity you specifically came for, because the park-level list is where the surprises are. A bathroom is on 5 of the 12 records. A playground is on 7. A dog park is on exactly one. If the park has two records under one name, as Purser-Hulsey does, open both. And if what you find disagrees with what the town publishes, as it does on Squirrel Lake Park’s acreage, take the more recent of the two and treat the difference as a question rather than an error.

One last thing that has nothing to do with parks and everything to do with buying here. Confirm the parcel, not the mailing address. A Matthews address can sit in Charlotte, in unincorporated Union County, or inside the town, and the park list is the least of what changes with it. If you are working through a Matthews move and want the rest of the local record, our ranking of Matthews daycare by state records uses the same approach on a subject where the stakes are higher, and our regional look at which new parks are open tracks the built-versus-announced question across all of South Charlotte.

Frequently Asked Questions About Matthews NC Parks

What is the biggest park in Matthews NC?

The Mecklenburg County Regional Sportsplex at 2425 Sports Parkway, at 156.34 acres on the county boundary layer. Among parks the Town of Matthews itself operates, the largest polygon belongs to Purser-Hulsey Park at 91.43 acres, and the largest conventional town park is Squirrel Lake Park at 34.45 acres. Figures read from Mecklenburg County park boundary records on September 28, 2026.

Does Matthews NC have a dog park?

Yes, one. Of the 21 park records Mecklenburg County lists in Matthews, exactly one carries a dog park: Purser-Hulsey Park, on the record filed at 3024 Matthews-Mint Hill Road. The second Purser-Hulsey record, filed at 13201 Phillips Road, does not list the dog park, so check the address before you go. Read from county park records on September 28, 2026.

Which Matthews NC parks have a playground?

Seven of the 12 parks you can visit have a playground on the county record: Squirrel Lake Park, Windsor Park, Matthews-Sardis Park, Stumptown Park, Baucom Park, Rice Park and the Mecklenburg County Regional Sportsplex. Six of those seven also record playground swings. Counted from Mecklenburg County park records on September 28, 2026.

Is Colonel Francis Beatty Park in Matthews?

It depends which record you read, and both answers are defensible. Google gives the address as 4330 Weddington Road, Matthews, NC 28105. The Mecklenburg County park record for the same park carries a city value of Charlotte and lists Mecklenburg County as the operator. It is a county regional park rather than a Town of Matthews park either way, so it is not counted in the 21 records above.

Are there walking trails in Matthews NC?

Yes. Seven of the 12 parks you can visit record hiking or walking trails: Squirrel Lake Park, Windsor Park, Matthews-Sardis Park, Baucom Park, Rice Park, Purser-Hulsey Park and the Sportsplex. Separately, five named active greenways touch Matthews town limits, led by Four Mile Creek Greenway. Purser-Hulsey Park is the only Matthews park record listing mountain biking.

Which Matthews NC parks have a restroom?

Five of the 12: Squirrel Lake Park, Windsor Park, Matthews-Sardis Park, Stumptown Park and the Mecklenburg County Regional Sportsplex. Rice Park and Baucom Park both have playgrounds and no restroom on file, which is worth knowing before a long visit. Counted from Mecklenburg County park records on September 28, 2026.

About the Author

Steve Jarrell is a licensed North Carolina and South Carolina broker and the team lead of The Longleaf Group at eXp Realty, which he co-leads with his wife Amanda. Before real estate, Steve joined VisualTour as President, led its rebrand to Paradym, and led the company to its acquisition by Constellation Software in 2020. He holds an MBA from the University of Tennessee with concentrations in Marketing and Innovation. The Longleaf Group is an eXp ICON Team and a RealTrends Verified Top Team by Volume for 2026, with 140+ five-star reviews.

Steve lives in Weddington, about fifteen minutes from downtown Matthews, and works this stretch of the county every week. Reading a county dataset row by row is a habit from the software years, and on a town where the mailing address and the town line disagree as often as they do in Matthews, it is the only way to get a list like this right. You can reach him at 704-774-7170 or steve@jarrellhomes.com.

How we sourced this

Every figure here comes from a Mecklenburg County record read on Monday, September 28, 2026, and cross-checked against the Google Places API the same day. Park names, addresses, status, operating hours, parking counts, operator and the amenity flags come from the county’s park locations dataset, filtered to records with a city value of Matthews.

Acreage comes from the county’s park boundary layer, and 4 of the 21 records have no boundary polygon, which is noted in the table. Greenway names and status come from the county’s greenway layer, queried against the Matthews town boundary rather than a bounding box. The reader-facing version of all of it is the county’s Find Parks map and the Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation parks pages, with its greenways pages and TrailLink’s Matthews trail maps for the paths.

Two things I could not confirm, named rather than papered over. The Town of Matthews publishes its own park pages, and no page we opened carries its acreage in a form we could re-check, so the town’s figure for Squirrel Lake Park, which it has published as 36 acres against the county’s 34.45, is not independently re-checked here and the county polygon is what the table carries.

And the three undeveloped records were last edited by the county between November 18, 2024 and May 23, 2025, so I can tell you what the county’s published status says and not whether anything has broken ground since. Amenity counts here are counts of the flags the county records, not a judgment about any park.

Last updated: September 29, 2026