Bear Creek Lake State Park
— the small lake the forest grew up around.
Not only on a wall.
Bear Creek Lake 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.
“A forty-acre lake held inside a working state forest, with a sand swimming beach, a quiet campground, and trails that loop out into the loblollies. Bear Creek Lake is one of Virginia's smaller state parks — under three hundred and fifty acres — but it sits inside the sixteen-thousand-acre Cumberland State Forest, so the woods keep going past the park boundary. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the lake and the bones of the park in the 1930s. The water is dark, slow, and warm by July. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Bear Creek Lake State Park sits in Cumberland County, Virginia, about an hour west of Richmond, entirely within the 16,233-acre Cumberland State Forest. The park covers 326 acres and centres on a 40-acre impoundment of Little Bear Creek. The site was developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s under the federal land-utilization program that consolidated worn-out cotton and tobacco farms into the surrounding forest. Virginia opened it as a state park in 1962. The lake and the older trails inside the park preserve a clear Depression-era plan.
The lake is a quiet, dark-water Piedmont impoundment, ringed by hardwoods and loblolly pine. Gas motors are not permitted; the water moves only under paddle power or trolling electric. The park rents canoes, kayaks, paddleboards, and rowboats from the boathouse in season. Fishing runs to largemouth bass, bluegill, redear sunfish, and channel catfish, under a Virginia freshwater licence. The roped-off sand swimming beach opens around Memorial Day and closes after Labor Day. Water temperatures climb past eighty degrees by mid-July and stay warm into early September.
The park is open year-round, dawn to dusk, with a per-vehicle parking fee that is waived for state-park-pass holders. The campground holds about 50 sites with electric and water hookups, plus a handful of camping cabins and yurts; the lodges and group cabins sleep larger parties. Inside the park you can hike the Lakeside Trail loop, and from the trailheads at the east end the Cumberland Multi-Use Trail runs deep into the surrounding state forest for hikers, mountain bikers, and equestrians. Reservations on summer weekends are essential.
