 Overview of Hugh Mills Stadium, Sep-2020. |
 The main grandstand bowed around home plate, accommodating baseball and football. |
 This newer grandstand eliminated the old outfield. |
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Overview of Hugh Mills Stadium, Sep-2020. |
The main grandstand bowed around home plate, accommodating baseball and football. |
This newer grandstand eliminated the old outfield. |
This stadium, now used only for football and track including state track and field championships, was built as a multi-purpose facility in 1936. The Albany Travelers, who had played across town starting in 1935, had a wildly successful season in 1938 and moved to the municipal stadium for the 1939 season, in which they repeated as league champions, now sporting the name of their parent club.
After the 1958 season, the league folded; it returned briefly for 1962-63 but Albany was not part of the league in those last two seasons. Following the 1958 season, high school baseball moved to a different field near Albany High School, a few blocks away, and Hugh Mills Stadium, named in 1952 for a man known as the “father of Southwest Georgia Sports” according to local literature, was expanded in the early 1960s by building a second football grandstand in what had been the outfield. When pro ball returned to Albany in 1993, they used a modern complex on the outskirts of town, by the Flint River.
Today, there is no evidence that baseball had ever been played here, but the facility, unique in that it was constructed inside a limestone sink that forms a natural bowl, continues to see use for football by four high schools in Dougherty County as well as several middle schools.