Suwannee River Big Shoals
— the one place in Florida the river actually drops.
Not only on a wall.
Suwannee River Big Shoals, 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.
“Big Shoals sits on the Suwannee in Hamilton County, the only stretch of true whitewater in Florida. When the river gauge reads between 59 and 61 feet, a quarter-mile of limestone ledge stirs into a Class III run. Lower and it's bony; higher and the rapids drown out flat. Most days it is a quiet hardwood bluff above tea-coloured water. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Big Shoals State Park covers roughly 5,800 acres along the Suwannee River in Hamilton County, three miles east of White Springs. The shoals themselves are a quarter-mile run of limestone ledges where the river drops about nine feet. Florida State Parks lists it as the only Class III whitewater rapids in the state, runnable when the gauge sits between 59 and 61 feet. Outside that window the ledges show as bare rock or wash out under high water from the Okefenokee Swamp upstream.
The Suwannee runs the colour of strong tea here, stained by tannins from the cypress and Okefenokee headwaters in Georgia. At Big Shoals the river bed lifts into Suwannee Limestone, a soft Oligocene rock the current has carved into ledges and pour-overs. Paddlers portage on river-right along a marked trail when the level is wrong for running. The Suwannee River Water Management District publishes the White Springs gauge that decides whether the shoals are a rapid, a rock garden, or a flat tongue of moving water.
The park entrance is on Highway 135 north of White Springs, with a $5 vehicle fee at the honor box. From the parking area a 0.8-mile trail through longleaf pine and turkey oak reaches the overlook above the rapids. Cyclists and walkers also pick up Big Shoals from the Woodpecker Route, a paved 3.4-mile spur off the Florida State Parks Trail system. The park is open eight to sunset year-round, and the nearby Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center anchors the broader White Springs visit.
