While visiting family at Thanksgiving, we went to the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, PA. It was founded by Henry Mercer in 1916, and is housed in a reinforced concrete castle, designed by Mercer. Mercer was a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement, and was obsessed with collecting all the tools and artifacts of pre-industrial American culture. What makes the museum special, though, is not just the artifacts that it contains, but rather the way in which they are assembled and displayed. Mercer wanted every possible variant of any tool; thus rather than, say, one shoe making tool, there are 30 or 40 different variants of each kind of tool, all numbered and on display in tiny little illuminated rooms that you can only see through their windows. Literally every square inch of the castle/museum is covered with stuff; even the ceiling has multiple objects hanging from it. The result is the ultimate clutter; I have never seen anything like it. It's like the giant attic of a man who could never throw anything way. It's a giant work of installation art, or even outsider art. It's kind of nice to see a museum which really doesn't try very hard to achieve its ostensible educational mission.
The exterior:
The center part of the museum is a seven story atrium, where you can see everything possible.
This is looking straight up, where things are hanging on the ceiling:
Some of the objects on display;
Doylestown itself is a wonderful small town, anchored by the fabulous County Theater:
There are lots of old houses and even a nearby nature preserve.
Though this house is strangely dwarfed by the water tower behind it.
