Mobile
— — the oldest Mardi Gras in America, under the live oaks.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest city in Alabama, founded in 1702 as the capital of French Louisiana, twenty years before New Orleans. Mobile sits at the head of Mobile Bay where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers empty toward the Gulf. The first American Mardi Gras was celebrated here in 1703. The live oaks along Government Street are draped in Spanish moss the year long.
Mobile, 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.
Mobile lies on the western shore of Mobile Bay in southwest Alabama, at the head of the bay where the Mobile-Tensaw Delta empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The city was founded in 1702 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville as the first capital of French Louisiana, twenty years before New Orleans. The metropolitan area holds about 430,000 residents; the city proper has about 187,000. It is the third-largest port in the United States by tonnage and the only deepwater port in Alabama.
The first Mardi Gras carnival in what is now the United States was celebrated at Mobile in 1703, a generation before New Orleans. The modern parade tradition dates to 1830 with the Cowbellion de Rakin Society. Each year about forty mystic societies parade through downtown from Twelfth Night through Fat Tuesday, with floats handed down within societies and throws of moonpies, beads, and stuffed animals. Joe Cain Day, the Sunday before Mardi Gras, honours the man who revived the carnival after the Civil War in 1866. The Mobile Carnival Museum on Government Street keeps the costume and float history.
The live oaks of Government Street, planted in the 1830s and 1840s, form one of the great urban canopies of the American South. Their branches carry Spanish moss the year long, watered by moist Gulf air pulled in by daily sea breezes off Mobile Bay. The Bellingrath Gardens at Theodore, twenty miles south of downtown, hold sixty-five acres of subtropical planting on the Fowl River. Hurricane season runs June through November; the Government Street oaks have stood through Frederic in 1979 and Katrina in 2005, with losses but not total ones.