Apalachicola historic waterfront
— the brick warehouses the cotton boats left behind.
Not only on a wall.
Apalachicola historic waterfront, 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 small port town where the Apalachicola River widens into the bay. The brick warehouses along Water Street were built for cotton in the 1830s and hold oyster bars and bookstores now. Shrimp boats still tie up at the city dock. Late afternoon, the light off the water carries up Avenue D, low and yellow, and the streets go quiet again. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Apalachicola sits in Franklin County on Florida's Panhandle, at the point where the Apalachicola River meets Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The town was incorporated in 1831 and grew quickly as a cotton port; by 1840 it was the third-busiest port on the Gulf, behind New Orleans and Mobile. The population today hovers near 2,300. The historic district covers about 200 buildings, many of them brick cotton warehouses on Water Street that now front the river walk.
The waterfront's bones are brick and tin. Trinity Episcopal Church, completed in 1838, was prefabricated in New York and shipped south in pieces, then assembled with wooden pegs. The Gibson Inn at the corner of Market and Avenue C opened in 1907 as the Franklin Hotel and still runs as a working inn. A block down, the Sponge Exchange courtyard remembers the brief sponge-diving boom of the 1890s, before the trade moved east to Tarpon Springs.
The whole historic district is walkable in an afternoon. Water Street runs along the river from the city dock north past the old cotton warehouses, with the Apalachicola Maritime Museum at the bend. Riverfront Park sits at the foot of Market Street and looks across to the shrimping fleet. The town is about 80 miles southwest of Tallahassee on US-98; Highway 98 crosses the river on the John Gorrie Memorial Bridge, named for the local physician who patented mechanical refrigeration here in 1851.
