Tower Hill
— a stone tower the city kept building up to.
Not only on a wall.
Tower Hill, 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.
“Rockford Tower sits on the hill above the Brandywine, fieldstone and roughly 115 feet of it, finished in 1902 as a working water tower for the growing city. The hill is part of Rockford Park now, a wooded shoulder over the river. On a clear afternoon the tower is visible from much of Wilmington — a fixed point the city kept building up to.
The place, in three passes.
The hill rises above the Brandywine Creek in Wilmington's Highlands and is the high point of Rockford Park, a city park acquired in 1889. Crowning it is Rockford Tower, a fieldstone water tower of roughly 115 feet completed in 1902 to the design of city engineer Theodore Leisen. The park sits within the broader Brandywine valley parks system. From the base of the tower the view runs east across the Brandywine and south to the Delaware River.
The tower is built of locally quarried Brandywine fieldstone, the same blue-grey rock that walls the surrounding mills and stone houses of the Brandywine valley. The masonry is load-bearing, the steel tank is hidden inside, and the upper observation level is reached by an interior stair. The Tower's design borrows from medieval European water towers more than from American utilitarian work of its era. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Rockford Park is open public space and free. The tower itself is open seasonally for guided climbs on selected weekends, hosted by the City of Wilmington. The most reliable view is from the lawn at the base, which is open dawn to dusk year-round. The park is a short drive from downtown Wilmington along Tower Road, with off-street parking at the tower lawn. The Brandywine Park footpaths connect downhill toward the creek.
