Doylestown Tries to Hold On to Its Past
By Carolyn Roland- In Delaware and S. Chester County PA, Carolyn Roland, GRI, CRS
(Independent architectural histor'n)
In my last blog entry I told you about the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Today, we will see that I wandered across the street to take a look at the grounds of its neighbor, the Mercer Museum, a six-story reinforced concrete castle designed by Henry Mercer (1856-1930) and completed in 1916. Containing 50,000 pre-Industrial tools, the permanent collection offers visitors a unique window into pre-Industrial America through sixty different crafts and trades, and is one of the world’s most comprehensive portraits of pre-Industrial American material culture. Having made a past visit to the Mercer, I knew the collection was quirky, with staircases pointing in all directions and no climate control above the first floor. Mercer collected the tools of dying professi...
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