Highlands Hammock State Park
— old oaks holding their shade.
Not only on a wall.
Highlands Hammock 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.
“One of the first four Florida state parks, opened in the 1930s before there was even a state-park system to fold it into. The hammock here is dense enough that the trail stays cool in July. Live oak, cabbage palm, cypress on the slough side, and a few oaks the rangers say are more than a thousand years old. The CCC catwalks from 1934 still hold.
The place, in three passes.
About nine thousand acres of old-growth hammock and cypress swamp in Highlands County, south-central Florida. The park opened to the public in 1931 as a private preserve and was donated to the state in 1935, making it one of the original four units of the Florida state park system. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the roads, trails, and elevated catwalks between 1933 and 1942; many of those structures are still in active use. The terrain is unusually high for peninsular Florida, with the Lake Wales Ridge running just to the east of the park boundary.
The hammock canopy is dense enough to drop the air temperature ten or more degrees below the open prairie outside the park boundary. Live oak, sabal palm, and pignut hickory hold the upper story; resurrection fern lines the limbs after rain. On the cypress slough catwalk the air stays humid through the dry season. The park lies within the recognized range of the Florida panther, listed federally as endangered, though confirmed photographs remain rare. Most visitors hear the deep call of barred owls before they see anything at all.
Eight short trails branch off the three-mile loop road, each under a mile. The Cypress Swamp Trail is the most visited: a wooden catwalk built by the CCC in 1934 and still under use today. The campground holds about a hundred and forty sites under the oak canopy. A small CCC museum on the loop road covers the park's 1930s construction history and the corps's work across the Florida system. The entrance is on County Road 634, about four miles west of downtown Sebring, open every day of the year sunrise to sunset.
