Monongahela River
— — a river that runs the wrong way and keeps going.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the few major rivers in the eastern United States that flows north. The Mon starts at Fairmont, West Virginia, where the West Fork and Tygart Valley rivers meet, and runs about 130 miles up through Morgantown and into Pennsylvania before joining the Allegheny at Pittsburgh to make the Ohio. Locks and dams hold the water deep enough for tow traffic; coal barges still pass through, though fewer than once. The hills come close to the banks. Some mornings the river holds a flat grey light that the trees on the far side never quite take. from the studio
Monongahela 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 Monongahela River forms at Fairmont, West Virginia, where the West Fork and Tygart Valley rivers meet, and flows roughly 130 miles north into Pennsylvania, joining the Allegheny at Pittsburgh's Point to create the Ohio. Its drainage basin covers about 7,340 square miles across West Virginia, Pennsylvania and a sliver of Maryland. The name comes from the Lenape Menaonkihela, often translated as "falling banks," a reference to the soft shale that gave way along the upper river. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District maintains a system of nine locks and dams along the navigable length.
For most of its industrial history the Mon ran heavy with acid mine drainage and steel-mill effluent, and pH readings below 5 were common into the 1970s. Reclamation under the federal Clean Water Act, state acid-mine treatment projects, and the closure of upstream mines have moved the river back toward neutral; the Three Rivers Quest monitoring programme based at West Virginia University now publishes monthly chemistry along the watershed. Smallmouth bass, walleye and channel catfish are again caught in stretches above Morgantown that were biologically inert a generation ago.
On the West Virginia stretch the river runs slow between hills that come close to the banks, and outside of Morgantown it is genuinely quiet. The Mon River Rail Trail follows the east bank for 48 miles from Prickett's Fort State Park up to the Pennsylvania line, almost entirely on old Baltimore and Ohio Railroad grade. There are stretches near Opekiska Lock where you can sit on the bank for an hour and hear nothing but a tug horn miles downriver. Coal barges still come through, but the river belongs more to cyclists and herons now than to industry.