Cape Vincent at the river mouth
— — the corner where the lake becomes a river.
Not only on a wall.
“The village of Cape Vincent sits at the exact corner where Lake Ontario narrows and starts moving as the St. Lawrence River. French refugees of the Napoleonic era settled here in the early 1800s and the names along the street still carry it. Out at Tibbetts Point a small white lighthouse has watched the turn since 1827. Freighters slide past in the channel. The lake ends here without ceremony.
Cape Vincent at the river mouth, 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.
Cape Vincent is a village in Jefferson County, New York, at the western end of State Route 12E, where Lake Ontario narrows into the head of the St. Lawrence River. The town was settled in the early 1800s by French émigrés tied to Vincent Le Ray de Chaumont, whose family had backed the American Revolution and gave the village its name. Today it is the smallest of the Thousand Islands river towns, with a year-round population just over a thousand and a single ferry crossing to Wolfe Island, Ontario.
At the western tip of the cape, the lake quietly stops being a lake. The mouth of the St. Lawrence is roughly two miles wide here between Tibbetts Point and Wolfe Island, and the current starts to pull. Freighters bound for the Seaway use the deep American channel that runs close to the New York shore. On still mornings the boundary is invisible. On a north wind it is not, the lake chop ending in a sharper, faster river chop within a few hundred yards.
Tibbetts Point Lighthouse stands at the corner itself, first lit in 1827 and rebuilt in its current form in 1854. The keeper's house is now a small hostel and seasonal visitor center, open in the warmer months. The village holds its French Festival each July, a holdover from the Napoleonic-era settlement. The Horne's Ferry to Wolfe Island runs through the summer and is the only car ferry from New York into Canada on the river.