November Nights: The Legacy of Henry Chapman Mercer

The gray mantle of evening had finally shrouded the light of a balmy midsummer’s day, and the good citizens of Doylestown, Pennsylvania were busy trimming their lamps and preparing their beds for the night when all of a sudden news began to spread of a great fire blazing on the outskirts of town. Fire engines were sent racing towards the supposed source of the fire, the Schroth residence on East Court Street, with scores of curious townsfolk following close behind. As the fire brigade and the accompanying throng of onlookers approached Swamp Road, it became clear that the flames lighting up the summer sky, and casting a lurid glare through the darkness of the Delaware Valley, were not emanating from the Schroth estate, but rather from the nearby Fonthill Castle, home of an eccentric local magnate by the name of Henry Chapman Mercer. The following morning, the Doylestown Intelligencer would describe with dry amusement how “in incredibly short time the firemen had all the apparatus going out toward the scene of the alleged fire and had the hose attached when it was found that the alarm was a fake. The fire was only a blaze that Henry C. Mercer had made on top of his concrete mansion farther out toward the swamp road to celebrate his birthday, which came on ‘bon-fire day,’ but naturally, anyone seeing the fire on top of a house at night would think the services of the company were needed. Nearly every resident of the town followed the fire company and the sidewalks were crowded for squares.” (READ MORE: The Paradoxical Christmas Nostalgia of Truman Capote)

It was June 24, 1910, Henry Chapman Mercer’s 54th birthday, which happened to fall on the traditional date of the summer solstice, as well as the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. An Augustinian monk of Lilleshall Abbey, writing in the 15th century, observed that “in the worship of St. John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St. John’s Fire.” We do not know precisely what materials went into Mercer’s misinterpreted midsummer blaze, but we do know where he built it: atop his concrete mansion, by the arch that sheltered a rooftop garden. The trade journal Concrete Age, reporting on the commotion of June 24 a few weeks later, suggested that “this was the sort of story that is causing the insurance man to sit up and take notice, and likewise the citizen who wants an indestructible house.” Mercer’s home had been constructed “of reinforced concrete throughout and a fire could be started in any part of the building without endangering a single structural feature except the window frames In some cases even these are made of cement. Foundations, walls, columns, beams, floors, stairways and roof are all of indestructible concrete, and the bonfire on the roof of this house was placed there at less risk than would be the case with a fire in the furnace of an ordinary house.” The bonfire that had so frightened Mercer’s neighbors was partly a birthday celebration, and partly an old-fashioned observance of the night of St. John, but it was also a demonstration of the invincibility of Mercer’s greatest architectural achievement.

Seeking to Capture the Past

Henry Chapman Mercer had always been fascinated and disturbed by fire’s creative and destructive capacity. As a teenager, he had seen how quickly and comprehensively the Great Boston Fire of 1872 had consumed his aunt’s collection of art and medieval armor. In “Castle Valley,” a semi-autobiographical short story included in his 1928 anthology November Night Tales, Mercer evoked the aftermath of a conflagration that destroyed a family heirloom, a precious stone engraved with the Latin inscription Per Varios Casus, a reference to Book One of the Aeneid:

 per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum

Tendimus in Latium

[Through so many accidents, through countless hazards

We’re reaching out towards Latium]

Artifacts that had survived the centuries, miraculously passing through countless hazards and accidents, could still be lost in mere seconds. Mercer, an architect, an archaeologist, an antiquarian, and a passionate collector was haunted by the specter of cultural destruction and became obsessed with castles, particularly ruined castles, which occurred regularly in his weird, Edgar Allan Poe-esque, M.R. James-ian stories, including “Castle Valley,” “The Well of Monte Corbo,” and “The Wolf Book.” (“Castles, castles, castles,” he wrote in a 1921 letter, “where do their stories begin or end?”) In the conclusion of “Castle Valley,” Mercer’s stand-in protagonist, Charles Meredith, finds himself in the middle of a “scene of desolation,” surrounded by smoldering embers, and it is at this point that he renounces a career in politics in favor of his architectural calling. (READ MORE: Anne Rice: The Good Witch Cancelled)

Mercer had studied the liberal arts at Harvard, and law at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was expected that a gentleman of his wealth, education, and standing in the community would pursue a career in state or federal politics, or at the very least one at the bar and on the bench. Drawn inexorably towards the material residuum of the past, Mercer instead opted to become an archaeologist and a preservationist. As an amateur architect, however, he kept an eye on posterity. “When we build,” urged John Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), “let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.’” Henry Chapman Mercer would assiduously collect the remnants of the dead past. He would also build for the future.

The Mind of Mercer in a Museum

Fonthill Castle was a sort of storage vault, constructed to withstand the maw of time and oblivion, and filled with artifacts and mementos from Mercer’s European travels. Walking through Fonthill, one is reminded of Francis David Millet’s 1899 painting The Expansionist (The Travelled Man), with its depiction of an eccentric scholar immersed in a veritable trove of artifacts, manuscripts, curios, and souvenirs gleaned from various far-flung excavations and bazaars. Mercer the gentleman anthropologist was perhaps the quintessential expansionist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the consummate dilettante (in the best meaning of the word), stuffing his home from floor to ceiling with art and artifacts and filling what space was left with the sweet strains of poetry and music. His personal motto he borrowed from the Habsburg emperor Charles V — plus ultra, “further beyond.” 

Not content to collect merely for himself, he singlehandedly created the Mercer Museum, another architecturally, idiosyncratic, poured-in-place concrete structure located about a mile from Fonthill, which would house his immense treasury of some 25,000 pre-industrial hand tools. While serving as curator of American and prehistoric archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and as assistant editor for the American Naturalist journal’s Department of Archaeology and Ethnology, Mercer had excavated cave and mound sites from Maine to the Yucatan peninsula, publishing his findings in the American Anthropologist, the Antiquarian, the Archaeologist, and the American Naturalist, but it was in the spring of 1897, with his health failing from his incessant exertions, that he began to explore the tangible cultural heritage available closer to his Doylestown home. In an address to the Bucks County Historical Society, Mercer related how he had:

gone to the premises of one of our fellow-citizens, who had been in the habit of going to country sales and at the last moment buying what they called “penny lots,” that is to say valueless masses of obsolete utensils or objects which were regarded as useless . . . The particular object of the visit above mentioned, was to buy a pair of tongs for an old fashioned fireplace, but when I came to hunt out the tongs from the midst of a disordered pile of old wagons, gum-tree salt-boxes, flax-brakes, straw beehives, tin dinner horns, rope-machines and spinning wheels I was seized with a new enthusiasm and hurried over the county, rummaging the bake-ovens, wagon-houses, cellars, hay-lofts, smoke-houses, garrets, and chimney-corners, on this side of the Delaware valley.

The objects in his ever-growing collection, which was opened to the public in 1916, provided what Mercer called a “fresh grasp upon the vitality of the American beginning,” illustrating “an humble story” that would “unfold by degrees a wider meaning, until at last the heart is touched.” When the industrialist Henry Ford visited the Mercer Museum in September 1923, he declared “this is the only museum I’ve ever been sufficiently interested in to visit. Some day I expect to have a museum which will rival it.” The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, modeled in many ways after the Mercer Museum, would open in 1933. Like the Henry Ford Museum, Sir John Soane’s Museum in Holborn, and a few other institutions that straddle the line between the brilliant and the eccentric, the Mercer Museum is more than just a cabinet of curiosities. It is the very embodiment of the restless and obsessive mind of its creator.  

Mistaken for Former Centuries

Earlier in life, during his radiant youth, Mercer had wandered across Germany’s Ruhr Valley, only to be struck by the vertiginous decline in artisanal culture being wrought by rapid industrialization. The same process was occurring in the Delaware Valley, and the gentleman anthropologist worried that “so beautiful an art as that of the old Pennsylvania German potter…should perish before our eyes.” Now operating within what anthropologists call the “salvage paradigm,” Mercer was determined to rescue these antiquated modes of production from the effects of unthinking, efficiency-minded modernity, and so, after apprenticing himself to a Pennsylvanian German potter, Mercer founded the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in 1898, situating it on the grounds of Fonthill and housing it in a cast-in-place concrete structure similar to his personal residence and his museum. Under Mercer’s direction, the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works produced incomparable quarry, mosaic, brocade, and decorative tiles glazed in blue, green, lilac, black, brown, white, and two shades of yellow, and it is by these works that the eccentric Doylestown magnate best expressed his individual genius. 

Moravian Pottery tiles and mosaics can still be found adorning the Pennsylvania State Capitol building, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Rockefeller estate at Kykuit, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the Saint Louis Public Library, the Casino at Monte Carlo, and elsewhere. Mercer’s pottery is still in operation, now under the aegis of the TileWorks of Bucks County 501(c)(3) organization, offering workshops and apprenticeship programs while contenting to produce ceramics using Mercer’s original molds and locally sourced clay (the only alterations being a lessened reliance on toxic lead and other heavy metals in the glaze). Having myself been born in the shadow of Fonthill, I take Moravian Pottery ceramics with me wherever I go, ensuring that my native soil — in the form of wild Bucks County clay transformed by the ceramicist’s alchemy into gorgeous decorative tiles — is always close at hand. One of those glazed earthenware tiles, a bit chipped now but fundamentally intact, I have carried with me for more than two decades. It features a lit candle and Thomas Carlyle’s motto, Terar dum prosim, “I burn while I am of use.” 

Henry Chapman Mercer, as a proponent of the American Arts and Crafts movement, took considerable pride in the prospect of these artifacts being “mistaken for tiles from a former civilization, because they are made in the same way a less hurried civilization made them.” He had marveled at “the manner in which mother earth grows out of the human touch into bowl or vase,” and would have agreed with D.H. Lawrence’s assertion:

The things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into 

are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing 

for long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely,

Warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

A Man Out of Place In His Own Time

Mercer was obviously a man out of time. While he was reviving the decorative traditions of the past, modernists were arguing that ornament itself was a crime. The Austrian architect (and child sexual abuser) Adolf Loos declared that “stragglers” like Mercer and his fellow traditionalists were slowing down “the cultural evolution of the nations and of mankind; not only is ornament produced by criminals but also a crime is committed through the fact that ornament inflicts serious injury on people’s health, on the national budget and hence on cultural evolution.” Mercer knew better. In his copy of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, he scribbled in the margins a terse review of modernist literature: “As convincing as a tapeworm. As charming as a bottle of dead flies.” He felt the same way about modernism’s built environments and material culture. He was largely ignored, and the result is the filthy present. (READ MORE: La Dolce Vita: The Moral Dichotomy of the Middle Class)

The sharp decline in artisanship, coupled with the rejection of ornamentation in domestic and public architecture, constitutes the real aesthetic crime. As the modern-day Scottish neoclassical sculptor Alexander Stoddart, presently the King’s Sculptor in Ordinary, argued in 2008:

The Left, early in the last century, failed to secure direct revolution in the West, so another tactic was adopted — to dismantle the institutions of the Occident in a long, piecemeal slog. The focus fell on the arts, and this explains why the high music and visual arts of today are so startlingly different from anything you might encounter in undeconstructed times. Where the family, say, was singled out as a sinister and coercive societal institution, so certain artistic forms likewise became suspect: the tune; the rhyme; the moulding; the plinth. Today they are half-heartedly trying to reconstruct the family; but the cultural institutions are proving harder to patch up and this can be attributed to something in the artistic forms of traditionalism that the newly barbarised human being deeply dreads. The Modernism of the last century has forged a sub-sensibility, where man is engineered to be a healthy kind of ignoramus — a Superman — unneedful of the analgesic mercies that art of the old sort delivered into the veins of suffering humanity. The pain is the gain — so let’s write poems that are merely chopped prose, boil our testicles to win the Turner prize, build houses that look like washing machines for living in and, if we make statues at all, make sure they are bolted down at pavement level, so we can “interact” with them (usually with some vomit on a Saturday night).

This was the world that Mercer predicted and feared. He recognized that he was living in a cultural November, dominated by those, to borrow the words of Léon Bloy, who “are by nature people who hate and destroy heavens. When they see a beautiful site, they have no more pressing dream than to cut the trees, dry up the springs, build streets, shops and urinals. They call this ceasing a business opportunity.” And now we are living in a cultural December, a sort of artistic and artisanal heat death, owing to those misplaced notions of “progress” and “cultural evolution” advanced by the imbeciles and barbarians of modernism and post-modernism. If any hope remains, it resides, as Mercer’s contemporary, the French novelist Maurice Barrès, put it, in la terre et les morts, the land and the dead. The gentleman anthropologist of Fonthill understood this as well as anyone. He gathered about him the artifacts of the past and extracted local red Bucks County clay to create what must count as some of the most beautiful objects ever made.

Another one of Mercer’s causes célèbres, fitting in light of his preservationist inclinations, was his opposition to the plume trade, that vile institution which brought about the deaths of tens of millions of egrets and other shorebirds so that their feathers might adorn ladies’ hats. (Here is one case in which ornament was indeed a crime). In “Fashion’s Holocaust,” a jeremiad published in City and State on Feb. 3, 1897 — fully 16 years before the German philosopher Ludwig Klages’ influential and similarly-themed essay “Man and Earth” —  Mercer lamented modernity’s Darwinian turn:

Ahead of all his fellow-creatures in the bloody struggle, where it has been said the fittest only survive, how long shall man hold fast to the grosser habits of the conflict? At an immense advantage over the weaker children of earth and air, he turns upon them as cows turn upon a wounded cow, as wolves devour a sick wolf, as birds peck a wounded bird to death. He invents new apparatus, irresistible engines for sport, vanity, experiment, and amusement, until as a civilized Christian at the end of the nineteenth century he makes more blood and pain than as an ape he ever dreamed of. These are but idly framed sentences, to those who only think. But to those who feel, they are torture.

Newly-barbarized modern man, in all his sub-sensibility, has simultaneously declared war on culture and nature, with appalling consequences, but Mercer still hoped for the renewal that would come with a cultural spring:

If there exists no motive superior to comfort, utility, or convenience, then it were vain to plead. Then might we logically go on our way unconcerned, while our pleasure in animal death and pain continues, till at last “an immense agony will have ceased, and with it there will have passed away the last smile of the world’s youth.” But somewhere in the bloody struggle from mollusk to fish, from fish to reptile, from reptile to mammal, from mammal to man, we can believe that pity found its warrant in the birth of affection. Not all teachers, yet some, have proclaimed their recognition of love’s unselfish inspiration in the thirty thousand years, more or less, of known human record. Since men lived in caves it glowed in the passion of the mother for its young. Leading onward to immeasurable heights, it glorifies the taming of the wolf, and the transformation of the ferocious jackal, into the friendly dog. While the listeners are few, it is because of this, let us admit, that the voice of the pleader grows louder, and that we may look forward to the dawning of a wider mercy without despair.

Henry Chapman Mercer’s voice may have been a lonely one in the cultural wilderness of the fin de siècle, but in the cultural horror-scape of the present day, it still resounds as forcefully as ever. It warns us of how the “sport, vanity, experiment, and amusement,” and all the other “grosser habits” of modern life, can culminate in untold “blood and pain.” It reminds us of “the manner in which mother earth grows out of the human touch” into the finest objects imaginable, and of the profound importance of salvaging what we can, while we can so that it might be laid in store for better times ahead.