Americana
— — a southern accent the Atlantic forest learned.
Not only on a wall.
“A Brazilian city founded by Confederate refugees who sailed for São Paulo after the American Civil War and put down roots in the red-earth country west of Campinas. The cemetery at Santa Bárbara d'Oeste still keeps their stones. Textile mills built the town through the twentieth century. Today it is a working interior city of about 240,000, with sugarcane fields at the edge of town and the Atlantic forest rising on the horizon.
Americana, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Americana sits in the interior of São Paulo state, about 130 kilometres northwest of the capital and just east of Piracicaba. The city is part of the Campinas metropolitan region and sat at about 242,000 residents in the 2022 census. The terrain is the gently rolling planalto of central São Paulo at roughly 555 metres elevation, drained by the Piracicaba river basin. Sugarcane, citrus, and textiles built the modern economy; the old Carioba mill on the Quilombo river anchored industrial growth from 1896.
The settlement traces to 1866, when Colonel William Hutchinson Norris of Alabama led one of the first parties of Confederate refugees south to the interior of São Paulo after the American Civil War. Several thousand southerners eventually settled across the Santa Bárbara and Americana area. Their descendants, known as confederados, kept Protestant services, southern cooking, and a small annual gathering at the Cemitério do Campo in neighbouring Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, where the original immigrant graves still stand. The Festa Confederada each spring draws the diaspora back.
Americana is reached from São Paulo on the Rodovia dos Bandeirantes (SP-348), about a ninety-minute drive in normal traffic. Campinas, the regional hub, is roughly forty kilometres east on the same axis. The interior climate is humid subtropical: hot wet summers from December through March, dry mild winters from June through August. The Salto Grande reservoir on the Atibaia river is the local water; the Cemitério do Campo, the main confederado heritage site, sits a short drive west in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste.