Spotsylvania Court House Battlefield
— the oak the bullets cut down at the Bloody Angle.
Not only on a wall.
Spotsylvania Court House Battlefield, 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 field in Spotsylvania County where the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia met for two weeks in May 1864. The hardest hours fell at a kink in the Confederate line called the Mule Shoe, where rifle fire alone cut down a white oak more than twenty inches across. The trunk section is now at the Smithsonian. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Spotsylvania Court House sits in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, about ten miles southwest of Fredericksburg. The battlefield is part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, established by Congress in 1927 and administered by the National Park Service. The battle was fought from May 8 to May 21, 1864 — the second engagement of Grant's Overland Campaign and a direct continuation of the Wilderness fight a few days earlier. Combined casualties across the two weeks reached roughly thirty-two thousand. The court house village itself sat at the road junction the armies were fighting to control.
The battle turned on the morning of May 12, 1864, at a salient in the Confederate line known as the Mule Shoe. Union troops under Hancock broke through at dawn; Confederates under Gordon and Ramseur counterattacked through driving rain. The fighting at one corner of the works, since called the Bloody Angle, lasted nearly twenty-two hours hand to hand. Rifle fire alone cut down a white oak more than twenty inches in diameter; the surviving stump section is held by the Smithsonian Institution. By May 21 the armies were sliding south toward the North Anna.
The field is quiet now. Park Service interpretive trails follow the line of the Mule Shoe and pass the ground where the oak fell. The reconstructed earthworks are low and the woods have grown back close to the trace. Most visitors walk the loop in the early morning, before the heat. The Spotsylvania Court House village still stands a mile east, the courthouse itself rebuilt after the war. The combined park headquarters in Fredericksburg administers four battlefields across roughly thirteen square miles. Admission to the grounds is free.
