Booker Lane runs a little over a mile through the north end of town, and for the last couple of years the middle of it has been a construction fence. The park was closed. The 5K that starts every Fourth of July had to route around it. If you drove down Booker on a Saturday morning last October, you passed a job site on your way to the Peanut Festival.
That changed on July 2. And the shape of a Jay fall weekend changed with it.
The Park Reopened On A Thursday, Not A Saturday
About a hundred people showed up for the ribbon cutting at Bray Hendricks Park, with Town Manager Eric Seib giving the welcome and City Council member Mike Hutto opening in prayer. It was a weekday morning event, which is worth mentioning only because the park itself is now built for weekday-morning use in a way it wasn't before. The new build added a stationary workout area, tennis courts, basketball courts and pickleball courts on top of the 26-acre park's existing trails, ball fields and playground.
Pickleball is the quiet headline. Before July, if you wanted courts you drove to Milton. Now you walk out of a house off Spring Street and you're there in ten minutes. The Celebrate Freedom 5K on July 4 was the first big event held on the reopened grounds, and it was the 27th running of the race that Matt Dobson has organized since 2000, which continued even in the years the park was closed.
What A Fall Saturday Actually Looks Like Now
The town runs about 524 people at the last census count, which means the phrase "everybody's at the park" describes something close to a literal truth on a good Saturday. Here's the honest version of the loop most weekends will fall into once the weather turns:
| Time | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 a.m. | Bray Hendricks trails and workout stations | Cooler air, no midday sun on the asphalt loop |
| 9:30 a.m. | Pam's Country Kitchen or Dura-Med Soda Shoppe | Breakfast plate or a counter-seat coffee before the day gets long |
| 11:00 a.m. | Ball fields or pickleball courts | Youth league games back in Jay instead of a drive to Milton |
| 2:00 p.m. | Yard or workshop | Middle-of-the-day heat still real in October |
| 5:00 p.m. | Kooter Browns of Jay on Booker Lane | Doors don't open until 4:00 anyway |
| 7:30 p.m. | Jay High football, home weeks | The Royal Pride Band under a new director this season |
The Kooter Browns detail matters because it's on the same street as the park. Its address is 5061 Booker Ln, and it opens at 4:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday. You can walk from a late pickup game to a booth in under fifteen minutes. That wasn't the geography before.
The band note matters for a different reason. Jay High School's Royal Pride Band welcomed Collier McBride as its new director for the 2026–2027 school year, which sets the tone for what home games sound like this fall.
The First Weekend Of October Is The One That Bends The Rest Of Fall
Every fall calendar in Jay pivots around the Peanut Festival at Gabbert Farm. It's held every year in early October at 3604 Pine Level Church Road, 4.5 miles south of Jay off Highway 89. Free admission, free parking, 9 to 6 both days.
The scale is where a resident and a first-time visitor tend to see things differently. The festival has been a Gulf Coast fall tradition for more than 20 years, and now covers 15 acres and draws about 70,000 people to the Gabbert farm over two days.
A town of 524 hosts a weekend of 70,000. That's a multiplier of roughly 130x. Every gas station south of the light, every side road off 89, every parking pattern on Alabama Street reorganizes for two days and then goes back to normal.
If you live here, the practical questions are the ones nobody puts in a visitor guide. Which weekend to skip the drive south and do the errands you'd normally do on Saturday. Which route out of town avoids the Pine Level backup. Whether the sugar cane mill demo is running Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon this year. The festival's steady features include horse rides, an antique farm equipment display, a sugar cane mill, a pig chase, pony and train rides, and bluegrass, country and gospel music, plus green boiled peanuts that are the whole point for a lot of people.
For families whose kids are pageant-age, this is also the weekend that anchors the fall photo album.
Where The Evening Lands When The Festival Empties Out
Sunday evening of festival weekend is the sneaky test of a small town's restaurant capacity. Everyone leaves Gabbert Farm around the same time, and the population is technically back to normal but the appetite is not. The short list of places worth knowing about, in the order you're likely to actually use them:
- Kooter Browns of Jay on Booker Lane, the closest thing to a dinner-out anchor, and the one place with steady evening hours through the week.
- Camp 31 BBQ, the buffet-style barbecue stop that catches a lot of the drive-through crowd on Highway 4.
- Pam's Country Kitchen, which most people default to for breakfast and Sunday lunch.
- Mary Ruth's Restaurant, the country-plate lunch spot.
- New Jay Garden, the Chinese takeout that quietly fills the "not fried chicken again" slot in the weekly rotation.
- Dura-Med Pharmacy & Soda Shoppe, which is exactly what the name says and one of the more unusual lunch counters in this part of the state.
- Ol' Diamond Store, useful for a quick bite when you're already on that stretch of road.
If you're feeding a house full of festival guests on Sunday night, calling ahead is not overcautious. Two of the seven places on that list close at 8 p.m. or earlier depending on the day.
The Quiet Infrastructure Story Under All Of It
At the July 20 Town Council meeting, Mayor Shon Owens ran through a list of projects that don't sound like much on their own but add up to a different-feeling town by the time the Peanut Festival lands next October. The town received a grant to run sidewalks all the way down Booker Street to connect to remaining sidewalks on Spring Street, which will connect all the sidewalks. That's the walkable-park-to-Kooter-Browns future in one sentence.
The same meeting approved a Leadership Santa Rosa proposal for something even smaller and stranger. Robbie Rawls presented a request to keep planning a solar-powered, off-grid public charging station in Jay as a public safety and community resilience resource, giving residents and visitors a free place to charge phones and small devices during storms, power outages and every day park use, with the reopened park as the preferred flagship location. It's the kind of amenity you don't think about until the next tropical system takes power out for three days and someone with a paramedic-age relative needs a phone charged.
The meeting also included the less-photogenic maintenance news that keeps a small town running. A camera run down well No. 1 showed heavy mineral buildup on the screens at about 200 feet, which Water Treatment Operator Tony Howard said was blocking water from coming through. Griner Drilling pulled the pump on July 16. If your pressure has been off, that's why.
For The People Who Already Live On Booker Or Off 89
The reason to spend a fall Saturday paying attention to any of this is that the town is quietly reorganizing around a shorter loop than it had two years ago. The park, the sidewalks, the pickleball courts, the restaurants clustered along Booker and the county roads, and one two-day festival that still bends the whole month of October around itself. If your Friday-night football rhythm and your Saturday-morning coffee run happen to be on the same street, that's not an accident anymore.
If you're thinking about what your place on Booker or your acreage off 89 might be worth heading into the busier part of the year, or if a family member is asking questions about moving closer, Kelley Real Estate Co is happy to talk through it without any pressure. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever the timing works for you.
