Ijams Nature Center Quarry
— the quarry the marble forgot it was.
Not only on a wall.
Ijams Nature Center Quarry, 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.
“Mead's Quarry was cut for Tennessee pink marble that ended up in the floors of the National Gallery and the columns of the U.S. Capitol. The work stopped in the 1970s, the pit filled with groundwater, and the trees came back. Now it is a swimming hole and the trailhead of the Urban Wilderness. The cliffs are still pale where the saws went through. Paddlers cross it in the late afternoon and nobody says much about the noise the place used to make. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Ijams Nature Center sits on roughly 300 acres along the Tennessee River in south Knoxville, anchored by the home Harry and Alice Ijams turned into a bird sanctuary in 1910. The quarry itself is Mead's Quarry, opened in the 1880s by the Mead family to cut Holston Formation marble — the pink stone that floors the National Gallery of Art and lines columns in the U.S. Capitol. Cutting wound down through the 1970s, the pit slowly filled with groundwater, and the surrounding ridges grew back to oak-hickory forest. The site is the eastern gateway of the Knoxville Urban Wilderness, a connected 1,000-acre trail network south of the river.
The pale walls above the water are Holston Formation marble — geologically a limestone, marketed for a century as Tennessee pink marble. Quarriers worked it for the soft rose and grey banding that took a high polish. Stone from Mead's and the nearby Ross Quarry shipped to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the National Gallery, and the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville. The face above the swimming area still shows the vertical drill marks where channeling machines split the blocks free. When the pumps were turned off the cut filled to about 60 feet deep with cold groundwater the same colour as the stone above it.
The Ijams visitor center is open daily and trails are open dawn to dusk; admission is free, parking is free. Mead's Quarry is a half-mile walk from the lot, on the Will Skelton Greenway. Swimming, paddleboarding, and kayaking are allowed in the quarry between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with rentals from River Sports at the dock. The 12-mile South Loop of the Urban Wilderness leaves from the same trailhead. Dogs are welcome on leash on the land trails but not in the water. Late afternoon is the quietest hour, after the school groups leave.
