Wilmington's Hilton Park was the city's first public park, though it was later usurped by others. It was never the official home grounds of any collegiate teams, though Wilmington High School's football and baseball teams called the grounds home in the early 1900s, as did several local amateur teams.

Overall, NC State had a 1-0 record at this field, winning their sole non-conference game played.

  * Non-conference games

Though Hilton Park was Wilmington's first public park, it was not the city's first athletic park; that distinction belongs to Seaside Athletic Park, which was located on a hill west of Oakdale Cemetery (near the present Love Grove area), and was used intermittently from about 1875 to the mid-1880s. As the not-so-seaside park (named for its team of sponsor rather than its location) fell into disuse, the city was also keen on establishing a local park. As early as 1882, local papers clamored for such a retreat to be located at Hilton: "Just suppose free bathing houses and a free park were established at Hilton," dreamed one writer. Another writer echoed the sentiment a couple years later, stating that "there could not be found a more eligible point [for a public park] than Hilton."

Hilton was a point just outside of the city's northwestern city limits, the grounds of the former Maynard Plantation. In the century since its active use, the grounds had been segmented into various properties ranging from industrial to leisure, and in 1882, a portion of the property was "laid out in walks, terraced and sodded and inclosed [sic] with a neat fence" just as the columnists had suggested. This coincided with a surge in development on the island, with ventures like the Clarendon Water Works opening on parcels of the former plantation. Though the park was widely seen as a fine and beautiful park, there was one perceived issue: it lacked suitable athletic grounds. Improving them was a natural next step: they had been widely used informal baseball games since at least 1881, as Seaside Park prohibited Sunday baseball.

Steps towards resolving this were begun in 1892, though at the cost of the island's most famous inhabitant: the Harnett House. The house was built in the mid-1700s for Cornelius Harnett, Jr., an influential figure in the Revolutionary War, and namesake of Harnett County. The plantation eventually passed from his hands to John Hill, who named the grounds Hilton in honor of his family*. Lumberman W. E. Peregoy purchased the parcel which included the old Harnett house (which at that time had fallen into relative disrepair) in 1892, hoping to utilize it and the live oak-enclosed grounds surrounding it for his lumber company. Though Peregoy offered to relocate the house if the city furnished new bricks, his offer was ultimately rejected, and the century-old plantation house was mostly demolished; one wing remained as a mill office [1] [8].

In May 1892, the city's electric street railroad was extended to the Hilton area, and the park generally beautified by the same benefactor, with outlays totalling over $25,000 (over $870,000 in 2025). Among the improvements was a baseball diamond located in the northwestern portion of the park outfitted with about 400 seats, which was ready by July. A separate improvement to the same area was the first iteration of the Cape Fear Golf Club, a 7-hole links -- two of which were shared with the diamond. The grounds were in that manner for a decade, when the golf course moved to its own land in 1902. From then on out, it remained primarily the location of local baseball and football action. It was even the primary home of Wilmington's first professional baseball teams, the Gulls, in 1901 and 1902; to host the teams, the grounds were improved considerably, with the seating enlarged to at least 1,000 persons. Impressively, the grounds were lit as early as 1894, making them among the first such in the state, though no record of a night game has been found [2] [5].

Even after the semi-pro teams ceased operations after two abysmal seasons (both remuneratively and competitively), local amateur athletics continued at the grounds, though under increasing difficulty. By 1906, sportswriters opined that "old Hilton Park... is but little more than an open field," blaming the venue's poor status for the similarly lackluster financials of the local amateur leagues; the complaints were justified, as a fallen fence made it impossible to ticket games, with teams instead relying on donations from spectators to meet their funding. Additionally, the street car line to the diamond had been abandoned by this time, forcing patrons to walk to the extreme northwestern portion of city limits in order to catch a game. A new park, League Park, was established in 1907-1908; during that time, Hilton was used with increasing infrequency [3].

That changed some in September 1911, when Walter L. Parsley (former lead architect of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riots), who had recently acquired additional portions of the Hilton grounds, built a new diamond at "great personal expense." It's not entirely clear if this was in the same location as the old one or not; papers note it was "only one square from the [electric street]car line... and not quite half as far from the car line as old Hilton Park," though it's unclear if this is referencing the the athletic park in particular or the leisure park as a whole. Sometimes called Parsley's Field, the grounds were never enclosed (in line with Parsley's belief that the park should truly be public), and had no grandstand until May 1912. Nonetheless, it served as a needed location for additional games [4].

Though it saw use through 1916, the field's journey took yet another detour in 1917, when the Hilton Park area was converted into Camp Metts to assist with American involvement in the First World War. Quickly abandoned following the war, the "excellent but badly neglected" field was given without reservation by Parsley to local government in 1919, which in turn went to work improving the bleachers and backstop, yielding "the finest recreational grounds in Wilmington." No estimate of the capacity has been found, and whatever usage was short-lived: no games have been found between the early 1920s and the 1940s.

By the 1920s, Hilton Park was supplanted once again. As a 1964 columnist recalls, "Weeds and broomstraw took over the athletic field and golf links, and the grandstand, pavillion and other wooden structures soon went to decay" as Robert Strange Park became the city's premier playground. Hoping to bring some attention back to the city-owned grounds, city commissioner James E. L. Wade conceived the idea of creating the "world's largest Christmas tree" on the property of Walter Parsley's brother, R. A. Parsley. An ancient live oak was selected to be decorated in Christmas lights annually from 1928 until 2009, when the ceremonies were relocated in light of the aging stand-in evergreen's deteriorating condition; the treel fell in 2011, and the park has since became private property.

Indeed, the tree and surrounding wintertime festivities dominate local headlines when searching for Hilton Park, with athletic reports lapsing until the middle of the Second World War. The city built new seats for the park to sustain the post-war boon in activity, but the the usage was so incidental that a 1964 history of the park failed to mention the improvement even in passing. Besides a few half-hearted reports of an attempoted revival of the baseball diamond in 1946, Hilton Park's athletic usage seems to have slipped into misty memory [5] [6].

* Because of the variation in spelling from Hill and the similarity with another man with ties to the area, it was long believed by several Wilmington individuals that the grounds were known for Captain William Hilton, an influential early explorer of the Cape Fear area.

Pictures of Hilton Park

Unfortunately, none of these images show the athletic grounds at Hilton Park; instead, most are illustrative of the park in general. Nonetheless, they present an interesting picture of the grounds.