Sherbrooke
— — the city the two rivers meet in.
Not only on a wall.
“A city at the confluence of the Magog and Saint-François rivers, in the Estrie region southeast of Montreal. Hills and small mountains lean in from all sides; the brick mill buildings along the gorge are slowly turning to studios. The murals on the downtown walls hold the city's history in paint. Winters are long and the snow comes early.
Sherbrooke, 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.
Sherbrooke is the principal city of the Estrie administrative region in southern Quebec, about 150 kilometres east of Montreal and 50 kilometres north of the Vermont border. It sits at the confluence of the Magog and Saint-François rivers, in the foothills of the Appalachians; the surrounding hills are the northern reach of the Green Mountains. The Université de Sherbrooke and Bishop's University in neighbouring Lennoxville give the area a student population of more than 40,000. The city's name commemorates Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, a British colonial governor.
The Magog river drops through a narrow gorge in the centre of the city before joining the Saint-François; the gorge powered the textile and pulp mills that built nineteenth-century Sherbrooke. A pedestrian trail and a series of footbridges now run the length of it, passing the old Paton Mill — built in 1866 and at one point the largest woollen mill in the British Empire — and a working hydroelectric station. The Saint-François carries on north through the Centre-du-Québec toward the Saint Lawrence at Lake Saint-Pierre.
Winter holds the city from late November through March; snowfall averages just over three metres a year. The downtown is laid out for it, with covered passages between several of the older buildings and salted footbridges across the gorge. Spring runs short; the maples turn in early October and the surrounding hills move through orange and red for about three weeks. Bishop's University holds its homecoming in the brightest week, and the cidre-de-glace producers in the Eastern Townships start harvesting after the first hard freeze.