Pratt Rock carvings
— — a cliff a tanner spent twenty years writing on.
Not only on a wall.
“A bas-relief of horses, hemlocks, and a coat of arms carved into a bluestone cliff above the village of Prattsville. Zadock Pratt, the tanner who built the town in the 1830s, hired itinerant stone carvers to cut the panels between 1843 and the 1860s. People still climb the short trail off Route 23 to read them. The work has weathered, but the horse and the arm and hammer are still clear from the road below. — from the studio
Pratt Rock carvings, 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.
Pratt Rock sits above Route 23 on the eastern edge of Prattsville, in Greene County, on the northern slope of the Catskills. The carvings cover a bluestone outcrop reached by a short, steep trail from a small park at the base. Zadock Pratt, who founded the town and ran what was once the largest tannery in the world, commissioned the work between 1843 and the 1860s from itinerant stone carvers, most notably Andrew Pearse. The panels are often called America's first Mount Rushmore.
The carvings are cut into Catskill bluestone, the hard sandstone the region was quarried for through the nineteenth century. Among the figures still legible are a horse, a hemlock tree (a nod to the tanbark that built Pratt's fortune), an arm gripping a hammer, a coat of arms, and a niche Pratt had cut for his own tomb, though he was buried elsewhere. Weather has softened the edges over a century and a half, but the larger figures still read clearly from the road below.
The trailhead is at a small roadside park on Route 23 just east of the village center, open daylight hours with no fee. The climb to the carvings is short but steep, with rough stone steps and a chain handrail at the upper pitches. Sturdy shoes matter; the bluestone is slick after rain. From the upper ledge the view opens north across Schoharie Creek and the village Pratt built. Half an hour is enough to see it well.