Stephen Foster State Park Suwannee
— a bell tower over a slow brown river.
Not only on a wall.
Stephen Foster State Park Suwannee, 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.
“The state park at White Springs holds the carillon tower that plays Stephen Foster's songs over the Suwannee, the river he never saw but wrote into the state song in 1851. Live oaks and cypress lean into the water and the bend below the tower runs the colour of strong tea, stained by tannin from the swamps upstream. The Florida Folk Festival fills the grounds every Memorial Day weekend with fiddles, dulcimers, and shape-note singing. The rest of the year it is quiet, with herons working the shallows. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park sits on the Suwannee River at White Springs in Hamilton County, about an hour east of Tallahassee. The 800-acre park was dedicated in 1950 as a memorial to the composer Stephen Foster, whose 1851 song "Old Folks at Home" — the one that begins "way down upon the Swanee River" — was adopted as the Florida state song in 1935. Foster picked the river's name off a map and never visited Florida. The park preserves a long bend of the river, old-growth oaks, and a working folk-arts campus.
The Suwannee runs about 246 miles from the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico near Suwannee, Florida, and the stretch below the park carries the dark tea colour of a true blackwater river — tannins from cypress and pine in the swamp staining clear spring water. White Springs takes its name from the sulphur spring on the bluff, once a nineteenth-century health resort. The water is best read from the boardwalk above the bend, where the current is slow enough to hold the reflection of the live oaks on the far bank.
The Florida Folk Festival has run on the park grounds every Memorial Day weekend since 1953, making it the longest continuously running state folk festival in the country. Across three days, fiddlers, ballad singers, storytellers, and shape-note groups perform on stages set among the live oaks, with craft demonstrations on the folk-arts campus. The 97-bell carillon in the tower beside the river plays Foster's tunes on the hour through the rest of the year. Winter mornings are cool and clear, summer afternoons humid with afternoon thunder.
