Terlingua ghost town
— the town the mercury left behind.
Not only on a wall.
Terlingua ghost town, 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.
“Terlingua sits on a low mesa in the Big Bend country, an hour west of the national park. The mercury mines closed in the 1940s and the town walked away from itself; the adobe walls have been weathering down to the colour of the surrounding rock ever since. The Starlight Theatre, built in 1931 as a community hall, reopened decades later as a restaurant and porch. The chili cook-off comes in November.
The place, in three passes.
Terlingua sits at about 2,800 feet in Brewster County, far west Texas, on a low mesa above the confluence of Terlingua Creek and the Rio Grande. The Chisos Mining Company, founded by Chicago businessman Howard E. Perry in 1903, drew several hundred miners here to extract cinnabar, the ore of mercury, from the surrounding hills. By the mid-1940s the deposits had played out and the company dissolved; the town emptied within a decade. The current population of the surviving census-designated place is under sixty.
Adobe was the working material of the original town. Most of the company buildings, including the commissary, the powder magazine, and the row houses on the hill, were raised in mud brick faced with lime, and the same hills supplied the limestone for the cemetery markers. Eighty years of weather has melted the unrepaired walls back toward the dust they came from. The Starlight Theatre, the white-fronted Trading Company building, and the small church survived because someone kept the roofs intact.
The first Saturday in November draws the CASI Terlingua International Chili Championship, running since 1967 and one of two competing cook-offs that meet near the ghost town the same weekend each year. Day of the Dead, two days earlier, brings candles to the Terlingua Cemetery, where the wooden crosses and stone cairns light up after dark. Outside those two weekends and the cool winter months between October and March, the town goes quiet again; summer here regularly tops a hundred degrees.
