Hillsborough River State Park
— the only rapids in Florida.
Not only on a wall.
Hillsborough River 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 few places in Florida where the water actually riffles. The Hillsborough drops over a series of limestone shelves into a Class II run, the only set of rapids in the state. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the suspension footbridge over it in 1936. The cypress and live oak above have not moved much since.
The place, in three passes.
About three thousand four hundred acres along the Hillsborough River in Hillsborough County, twelve miles north of Tampa on U.S. Highway 301. The park opened in 1938 as one of the eight original units of the Florida state park system. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the roads, the campground, the suspension footbridge, and the stone retaining walls between 1934 and 1938; the footbridge over the rapids remains the park's signature structure. The terrain is unusually varied for peninsular Florida, with limestone outcrops, cypress swamp, and hardwood hammock all inside the boundary.
The rapids are the only Class II run in Florida, formed where the river crosses a band of Suwannee limestone resistant to the current. The drop is small, perhaps four feet over a hundred yards, but enough to break the surface white in flood and to riffle audibly in any season. Canoes and kayaks generally portage around it. Upstream and downstream the river runs slow and tannin-dark, holding a dense alligator population, river otter, and the occasional manatee on the lower bay-end reaches near Tampa.
The park keeps about a hundred and twelve campsites under the oak canopy, three picnic pavilions on the river, and seven miles of hiking and nature trails. Canoes and kayaks can be rented on-site; the suspension footbridge above the rapids is a quarter-mile walk from the parking area. Swimming is allowed in a man-made pool fed by river water, not in the river itself. The park is open every day of the year, sunrise to sunset, with a per-vehicle entry fee paid at the entrance station off U.S. 301.
