Killens Pond State Park
— a millpond the woods grew back around.
Not only on a wall.
Killens Pond State Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A 66-acre millpond in central Delaware, dammed in the late 1700s to power a grist mill that is long gone. The woods came back. Today the pond is the center of a state park with a loop trail along the shore, cypress at the south end, and the slow water that takes the color of whatever sky is above it.
The place, in three passes.
Killens Pond covers about 66 acres in central Delaware, about three miles south of Felton in Kent County. The state park surrounding it runs to roughly 1,200 acres of mixed hardwood and pine, with a perimeter trail of about three miles tracing the shoreline. The pond was created in the late eighteenth century by a milldam on the Murderkill River, and the state acquired the land in 1965. The park is one of seventeen units in the Delaware State Parks system and is open year-round, with a campground, cabins, and a seasonal waterpark on the north end.
The pond is shallow, fed by the headwaters of the Murderkill River, and stained the soft tannin brown common to Delmarva millponds. A stand of bald cypress holds the south end, unusual this far north on the peninsula, with knee-roots breaking the surface in the shallows. Fishermen take largemouth bass, crappie, and bluegill from kayaks and the small fleet of rental rowboats. There is no motor traffic. Sound carries; in the early morning the pond will hold a turkey gobbling from the far shore as cleanly as if it were ten feet away.
The park entrance is at 5025 Killens Pond Road off Route 13. A standard Delaware State Parks day-use fee applies in season. The Pondside Trail loops the shoreline in about three miles, with a boardwalk crossing the cypress shallows. The waterpark, with four slides and a kiddie pool, runs on weekends Memorial Day through Labor Day and daily mid-June through mid-August. Cabins and tent sites book early for summer weekends. Off-season, the trail is the reason to come.
