French Broad River
— the river older than the mountains.
Not only on a wall.
“The river that runs north out of the southern Appalachians, from the headwaters near Rosman through Asheville and on to the Holston above Knoxville. It is older than the mountains it cuts. Brown trout in the upper sections, smallmouth below; rafting where the gorge tightens at Hot Springs. The studio sits an hour from where it ends.
French Broad River, 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.
The French Broad rises in Transylvania County, North Carolina, near the town of Rosman, and runs about 218 miles north and west through Asheville, the Pisgah National Forest, and the Tennessee state line at Paint Rock. It joins the Holston River just east of Knoxville to form the Tennessee River. Geologists rate it among the oldest rivers on the continent, older than the Appalachian range it crosses, because its channel was set before the mountains rose around it. Most of its run drops gently through pasture and small towns.
Above Asheville the river is mostly walking water, slow and brown, with hatching mayflies in May and brown trout in the cooler tributaries that feed it. Below the city the gradient steepens through Madison County, and at Hot Springs the river breaks into Class III and IV rapids through a tight gorge. The smallmouth bass fishing through Marshall and on into Tennessee is the kind that builds a season around. The Pigeon and the Nolichucky drain into it before the Tennessee line; the Swannanoa joins at Asheville from the east.
Spring is rhododendron and high water; the runoff peaks in March and April when the gorge below Hot Springs runs hardest. Summer drops the river to wadeable shoals from Asheville south and brings the rafting crowds north of it. October turns the corridor through Madison and Cocke counties into one of the better stretches of fall colour in the southern Appalachians. Winter clears the canopy and the river reads grey and quiet, with the occasional bald eagle through the Hot Springs section and steady walleye fishing into the Tennessee headwaters.