Run your errands off Trojan Parkway on any given Saturday and you will be done in under an hour. Hobby Lobby, TJ Maxx, Ulta, Five Below, Ross, Harbor Freight, a Starbucks for the drive home. It is a full list, and it filled in fast. Try to find a sit-down dinner in that same stretch without driving toward the square, and the options thin out considerably. That gap is not an accident of bad planning. It is the order things actually got built in, and it tells you something real about what life off this corridor looks like right now versus what it will look like in a few more years.
The retail rush happened almost overnight
Trojan Marketplace broke ground on December 18, 2019, a roughly 120,000-square-foot development at the corner of Highway 231 and John Witherington Drive. Hobby Lobby was the first tenant to open, in late March 2021, and the rest of the anchor lineup followed within weeks: TJ Maxx, Ross Dress for Less, Ulta Beauty, Five Below, and Rack Room Shoes. City leaders confirmed a Starbucks was coming before the frontage was even finished. By the time the ribbon was officially cut, Hutton Real Estate's president told the crowd the project was only about halfway done and more was coming to the site.
More did come. A leasing flyer for the property from 2025 lists Harbor Freight and Starbucks alongside the original anchors, and notes the center sits surrounded by Lowe's and a Walmart Supercenter. Five Below's own store listing confirms its address as 1307 US Highway 231 South, the Trojan Marketplace address, and McAlister's Deli lists 1309 US Highway 231 South as its home. For anyone living off Trojan Parkway, that means the errand list, hardware run, prescription pickup, kid's shoe replacement, and coffee order are all handled inside a five-minute radius. That part of the corridor did its job quickly and it has held up.
Dinner took the long way
Restaurants are a different story. Before Trojan Marketplace opened, the mayor was already telling reporters what was still to come. In a 2021 interview about the shopping center, Mayor Jason Reeves said the city had "more major retailers, national retailers coming, as well as restaurants and hotels." Retail arrived on schedule. Restaurants took longer.
The first real answer to that promise did not break ground until December 12, 2022, almost three full years after Trojan Marketplace's own groundbreaking. That is when Baumhower's Victory Grille held its ceremony at 106 Trojan Parkway, next to the Publix that had already been anchoring that stretch. It was framed at the time as a new restaurant prototype for the Aloha Hospitality chain, built around more than 60 TVs and scratch-made food. In the years since, it has become the corridor's answer to a full-service, sit-down option that does not require a drive into downtown Troy.
Until Baumhower's filled that gap, the honest restaurant map along this stretch of Highway 231 looked like a fast-food and quick-casual rotation: Krystal, Jack's Family Restaurant, Arby's, with a handful of full-service names like Ruby Tuesday, Los Hermanos Mexican Restaurant, and El Rancho Grande scattered further down the strip. None of that is a knock on the food. It is simply a different category of dining than what the retail buildout suggested was coming. If you moved to Walters Branch expecting a restaurant row to match the shopping row on day one, the timeline explains why that took a few extra years to show up.
The real neighborhood hub isn't the shopping center
Here is the part that actually matters more day to day: the place where Walters Branch residents run into each other regularly is not Trojan Marketplace. It is Troy Sportsplex, sitting on Enzor Road close enough to the subdivision that the two locations' coordinates nearly overlap.
The Sportsplex has been building toward this role for decades. Phase I opened in the spring of 1991 with four softball fields on 65 acres. Phase II added four more fields in 1996, two at 200 feet and two at 285 feet, along with eight automated batting cages. A 1.1-mile paved walking trail opened in the summer of 2010, and Phase III added roughly 70 more acres for future use. The complex has hosted the Dixie Boys World Series twice, in 1995 and again in 1998, and the Ozone World Series in 2007.
That history is not trivia. It is the reason spring in this part of Troy has a rhythm to it. This year's youth baseball and softball season opened play on April 13, 2026, with registration set at $50 per player for ages 4 through 15. If you have a kid on a team, or a neighbor with one, the Sportsplex is where your weeknights end up. The walking trail does the same work for adults who just want a lap or two after work. None of that shows up on a shopping center leasing flyer, but it is where the actual community texture of living off Trojan Parkway comes from.
A few things worth knowing if you use the Sportsplex regularly:
- The walking trail is 1.1 miles and paved, running through the complex's open space.
- Batting cages have been in continuous use since 1996 and are available outside of scheduled games.
- Youth registration runs through Troy Parks and Recreation, with online and in-house deadlines posted ahead of each season.
- Storm damage has occasionally taken out bleacher seating in past seasons, so a lawn chair is a reasonable thing to keep in the trunk during baseball months.
The lake worth the short drive
When the corridor and the Sportsplex both feel like too much of the same routine, Pike County Lake is close enough for a half-day trip without eating up your whole Saturday. It sits five miles south of Troy off County Road 39, a 45-acre lake stocked with largemouth bass, bluegill, redear sunfish, and channel catfish. The lake underwent a major renovation completed in 2016, including dam repair and a new concession and conference building, and it reopened with an ADA-accessible fishing pier that one state guide lists as the largest of its kind among Alabama's public lakes.
The lake is open sunrise to sunset and closed all day Wednesday, according to Troy Parks and Recreation, which manages the site. A fishing license and a State Public Fishing Lakes permit are required for ages 16 to 64, available through the Outdoor Alabama program or at county probate offices. If you have never taken advantage of it, it is a genuinely local option that most people driving past on Highway 231 never think to turn off for.
What this actually means if you live here
None of this is a complaint about the neighborhood. It is a more accurate picture than the shopping center alone gives you. The stores solved themselves in under two years. The sit-down dining scene took closer to three, and Baumhower's is still the marquee proof that full-service restaurants were ever part of the plan. In the meantime, the actual social center of gravity here has been the Sportsplex all along, not the parking lot outside Ulta.
That is worth knowing whether you are three years into living off Trojan Parkway or three months in. The errands were covered almost immediately. The ballfields have been covered for decades. The dinner reservations took the corridor the longest to sort out.
If you are weighing a move to this side of Troy, or thinking about what your own property here is worth given how much has changed along this corridor since 2019, the team at David Adams Realty knows this stretch of Pike County block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation or just to talk through what the neighborhood actually looks like day to day.
