Things to Do in Kingsport With Kids

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Kingsport is an easy town to keep kids busy without spending much. A lot of the best options are free or close to it. Here's a working list, grouped by the kind of day you're having.

350 Clinchfield Street, downtown. The Kingsport Carousel runs year-round, Wednesday through Sunday afternoons, and every ride is $1. Volunteers spent years hand-carving and painting the animals for a working 1956 Herschell carousel, and it opened in July 2015. There are 32 riding animals and two chariots, including horses, a dragon, a tiger, and a zebra, plus 24 rounding boards painted with Kingsport landmarks. It has carried more than half a million riders.

Carousel Park next door has a fenced playground for kids 6 to 12, and the Kingsport Farmers Market is just down Clinchfield Street, so one trip downtown can cover both. Hours have shifted over the years, and the carousel has closed in January for maintenance, so check the city's arts site before you go.

Gray wolves, bobcats, red foxes, a raptor center, and a herpetarium full of native reptiles and amphibians, all along paved paths that work for strollers. Add the Fox Den Playground, a planetarium with family shows (kids 5 and under get in free), and a 44-acre lake. Entry is $7 per car. Everything you need to plan the trip is in our Bays Mountain Park guide.

1820 Meadowview Parkway. In summer, the outdoor water park opens with two water slides, a 900-foot lazy river, and a water playground with a lily pad crossing. It runs from around Memorial Day to Labor Day. Indoors, all year, there's a heated recreation pool with a water slide and splash area. Kids get measured at the door because admission is priced by height, and kids 2 and under get in free with a paying adult. Current prices and hours are at swimkingsport.com.

1101 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Free, zero-depth, and safari-themed, with water cannons, dumping buckets, run-through loops, and a palm tree that sprays. It runs from late spring through the end of September during the day. Turn it on by rubbing the silver activator pad on the wall between the restrooms. There's no lifeguard, so stay with your kids. The park next to it has a playground, picnic shelters, and restrooms.

490 Hemlock Road. When Darrell's Dream Boundless Playground opened here in 2007, Warriors' Path became the first state park in the country with a boundless playground. It's designed so kids of every physical and mental ability can play together, and it's still the only one in a Tennessee state park. Nearby, the Lions Narnia Braille Trail tells the story of Aslan across eight sensory stations on a quarter-mile accessible path, and the Anderson Treehouse is fully accessible too.

The park also has riding stables with horses and ponies, a marina on Fort Patrick Henry Lake that rents kayaks, canoes, paddleboats, and paddleboards, a seasonal outdoor pool, disc golf, and miles of hiking and biking trails. There's no entry fee.

About ten paved miles, flat for most of the way, so strollers and small bikes do fine. Start at Boatyard Riverfront Park, which has a playground, fishing piers, and a restroom, or at Cloud Park, which sits beside the trail with the Scott Adams Skate Park. Parking and trailheads are in our Kingsport Greenbelt guide.

4812 Orebank Road. Exchange Place is a volunteer-run living history farm on the National Register of Historic Places, with horses, a cow, a donkey, and sheep. The best time to bring kids is during one of its big public events: the Spring Garden Fair in April, the Fall Folk Arts Festival in September, and Christmas in the Country in December. Expect blacksmithing, open-hearth cooking, and, in spring, sheep shearing. Festival admission has been a few dollars for adults and free for kids under 12.

The Kingsport Axmen play in the Appalachian League, a summer wood-bat league for college freshmen and sophomores, at Hunter Wright Stadium on Granby Road. The season runs from June into early August. The Axmen won the league title in 2022 and again in 2026.

The carousel, the Riverview Splash Pad in summer, library storytimes, and the paved animal habitat paths at Bays Mountain all work for little ones.

Library storytimes, a planetarium show at Bays Mountain, or the indoor pools at the Kingsport Aquatic Center.

The Riverview Splash Pad, the Greenbelt, Warriors' Path State Park and its boundless playground, and library programs. The carousel is $1.

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