New Market Caverns
— the rooms the limestone keeps to itself.
Not only on a wall.
New Market Caverns, 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.
“Show caves run the length of the Shenandoah Valley, where slightly acidic groundwater has worked Ordovician limestone into rooms, ribbon stalactites, and slow flowstone over millions of years. The New Market neighborhood holds several of them — Endless Caverns south of the village, Shenandoah Caverns just north — opened to the public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The temperature underground stays in the mid-fifties year through. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The town of New Market sits in Shenandoah County, in the lower Shenandoah Valley between Massanutten Mountain and the Blue Ridge. The Valley floor is built on Cambrian and Ordovician carbonate rock, and slightly acidic groundwater has dissolved miles of cavern passage through it. Endless Caverns, just south of the village, was discovered in 1879 by two boys chasing a rabbit and opened as a show cave in 1920. Shenandoah Caverns, a few miles north on Stoney Creek Road, has run continuous tours since 1922.
The host rock is Ordovician limestone and dolostone, laid down roughly 450 million years ago when this part of the continent sat under a shallow tropical sea. Rainwater picks up carbon dioxide from soil, becomes a weak carbonic acid, and works the stone along joints. Calcite redeposited from drip water builds the cave's stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstone curtains. The Valley's caves stay close to 56°F year-round, the mean annual temperature of the surrounding bedrock.
Both caverns near New Market are reached off Exit 264 or Exit 269 of Interstate 81. Tours run daily in season, ticketed by adult and child, and last roughly an hour underground on lit, paved paths. A light jacket is sensible even in August. Endless Caverns is the older of the two and keeps a longer marked route; Shenandoah Caverns is the only Virginia cave reached by elevator and runs a separate barn complex with antique parade floats above ground.
