Trois-Rivières
— — a river town that learned to listen to two rivers at once.
Not only on a wall.
“Halfway between Montréal and Québec City, where the Saint-Maurice splits into three channels before meeting the Saint Lawrence and gives the city its name. Stone houses along Rue des Ursulines, a working port, the long quiet hum of pulp mills downriver. Founded in 1634, the second-oldest French settlement in North America. The old town keeps its scale; the river keeps its weather. — from the studio
Trois-Rivières, 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.
Trois-Rivières sits at the confluence of the Saint-Maurice and Saint Lawrence rivers, in the Mauricie region of Québec, roughly 130 kilometres northeast of Montréal. Founded by Laviolette in 1634, it is the second-oldest French-language city in North America after Québec City. The name comes from the three channels carved by Île Saint-Quentin and Île de la Potherie at the Saint-Maurice's mouth. The historic district of Vieux-Trois-Rivières holds the Ursulines monastery (1697), stone shops along Rue des Forges, and the working port that handled timber and pulp through the twentieth century.
The Saint-Maurice River runs 563 kilometres from the Laurentian highlands to the Saint Lawrence, and at Trois-Rivières it does the thing the city is named for: splits around two long islands into three mouths. For most of the twentieth century the river floated logs down to the mills; Kruger and Resolute Forest Products still anchor the local economy. The water reads dark and silty in spring melt, slate-blue in late summer, and ice-locked from December through March. The Saint Lawrence below town is already tidal here, brackish, half a kilometre wide.
The old town is walkable in an afternoon: Rue des Ursulines, the 1697 monastery, the Manoir Boucher de Niverville (1668), and the small Musée des Ursulines on the rise above the river. The Sanctuaire Notre-Dame-du-Cap, eight kilometres downriver in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, draws roughly 400,000 pilgrims each year and is one of Canada's national shrines. Summer brings the Festivoix music festival in late June. Winter closes the river to boats but opens skating on the Saint-Maurice channels. The Québec City–Montréal train does not stop here; arrival is by car or by the Orléans Express bus.