Wyoming Valley
— the river that took the valley back twice.
Not only on a wall.
“A thirty-kilometre stretch of the Susquehanna River between Pittston and Nanticoke, with Wilkes-Barre at its centre. The valley is anthracite country, the seam that built the railroads and burned in the kitchens of the East Coast for a century. The river has shaped the valley as much as the coal did, most decisively in the 1972 Agnes flood.
Wyoming Valley, 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 Wyoming Valley follows the Susquehanna River for about thirty kilometres through Luzerne County in north-east Pennsylvania, between Pittston in the north and Nanticoke in the south. Wilkes-Barre, the county seat, sits near its centre with a city population around forty-four thousand. The valley is hemmed by two long ridges — the Wyoming Range on the west and the Moosic Mountains on the east — and rests on the Northern Anthracite Coal Field that defined the region's industry through the twentieth century.
The Susquehanna defines the valley and has shaped its memory. The 1972 flood from Hurricane Agnes crested at 12.6 metres at Wilkes-Barre, well over the existing levees, and forced the evacuation of about a hundred thousand people. The river took the downtown and much of the floodplain. The levee system was rebuilt taller after, and held in the 2011 flood from Tropical Storm Lee, but the valley remembers Agnes the way coastal towns remember their named storms.
The valley has three dates the local memory keeps. The Battle of Wyoming, fought on 3 July 1778, was a Revolutionary War defeat in which a column of British-allied Loyalists and Iroquois overran a settler militia along the river. The Knox Mine Disaster of 22 January 1959, when the Susquehanna broke into a colliery near Port Griffith and killed twelve miners, effectively ended deep anthracite mining in the region. Hurricane Agnes followed in June 1972, the third great unmaking of the valley's previous shape.