The Head Spins

It's been an accidentally amazing day. Late the previous night I decided to join an excursion with friends to the Mercer Museum & Fonthill Castle in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which for these 30 years has been not very far from me and not very hard to visit. The place simply blew me away on this first visit.

It is a museum's museum, meaning that they don't make 'em like that anymore. Creator Henry Mercer (1856-1930) was the patron saint of collectors and hoarders, or at least that's how I see him.

There is simply no way to convey the impression the place makes. No photography is even allowed inside the castle, which was Mercer's home. It was continuously weird to be seeing what I was seeing without Ceridwen.

Here you see the main atrium, six stories high, around which the visitor walks along a spiraling path. On the outside of the walkway are small gallery rooms, filled with the tools used by workers in scores of trades, most of which no longer exist, such as shell workers (people who carved and crafted sea shells into finished things. But Mercer would find and buy whole workshops full of tools from earlier generations, over and over, all through his life.

Here you see whaleboats, carriages, and a wooden cigar store Indian, but it's endless. He has an entire gallows, i.e. the whole structure, and a horse-drawn hearse with a baby coffin in it.

Mercer was also an angel of tiles. His mansion (Fonthill Castle) is one of the most strangely wonderful houses I have ever entered. The tiles are beyond real description. He illustrated long chapters of history (especially New World exploration and conquest) with them --my favorite being the story of Gilles de Rais (Bluebeard), the legendary French serial killer. His views were somewhat right-leaning, he seems to have had no interest in religion, he never married, and he devoted his life to creating the museum, the castle, and the Moravian Tile Works (all on his estate in Doylestown). His curiosity was certainly not squeamish, but neither was it morbid. He was an archaeologist and a scholar of the history of tools.

I can't get much more across with more words, so I'll stop. If you pass through Estern Pennsylvania, spend a day at the Mercer. It's a gem!

But that wasn't all. A woman who came with my group, who I did not know before today, works at Eastern State Penitentiary (now a museum). She had heard of my research on early Philadelphia anarchists, and she said to me, "Oh Herman Helcher was incarcerated at Eastern State. One of his relatives inquired about him."

Herman was a mentally deranged anarchist who shot and nearly killed Voltairine de Cleyre, a very brilliant anarchist, in 1902. It's a hugely important story in my little world, but the evidence of Herman's brief existence after his mad act has escaped all research --he died in a mental asylum but when? --buried in what grave? Now there's probably more information to find, and a relative!

I'm giddy from all this!