The Community Table · Presented by The Churchville Inn

The Mercer Museum: A Concrete Castle Full of Early America

Six stories of concrete and more than forty thousand everyday tools, in the middle of Doylestown.

Historic Gothic Manor In Sunlit Park

The Mercer Museum is a six-story concrete castle in Doylestown, holding more than forty thousand everyday tools and artifacts from early America. Henry Chapman Mercer, a Doylestown native, began collecting the tools of preindustrial America in 1897, just as they were becoming hard to find even on the junk pile. He designed the castle himself to hold them, and when it opened in 1916 it had been built around the collection and not the other way around. Mercer later gave the building and the collection to the Bucks County Historical Society, and the castle is now a National Historic Landmark.

Inside, a towering central court rises the full height of the building, with a whale boat, a stage coach, and a Conestoga wagon hanging overhead. The alcoves and rooms on each level around it hold everything else, sorted by Mercer’s own classifications, from the healing arts to tinsmithing to dairying, and more than sixty early American trades are represented. Some of the oldest pieces are a two-thousand-year-old whale oil lamp and Native American implements from as far back as 6,000 to 8,000 BC. The museum stands at 84 South Pine Street and is open Tuesday through Sunday from ten to five, with adult admission at twenty dollars. Its own site has the current exhibitions and tickets.

Steampunk Museum Hall With Suspended Canoe

The season has its own events. The museum is showing The Doan Gang: Outlaws of the Revolution, and about a mile away at Fonthill Castle, Mercer’s own home, it holds Frightful Fun for Halloween.

Doylestown is not far from our door, and we send guests to the Mercer for the same reason Mercer built it: the ordinary things people made and used are worth stopping to look at. Spend an afternoon climbing the floors, and then come back to Churchville with something to talk about over dinner.

Part of The Community Table series · The Churchville Inn