Castles and museums and artifacts: I love the Mercer Museum!

Two weekends ago we wanted to get out of the house and actually do something besides trying to stay warm in the house since it’s finally starting to warm up around here. We decided to take a trip to Fonthill castle and Mercer museum in Doylestown, PA. We took a guided tour of the castle that Henry Mercer built and lived in and then drove over to the museum which I found so incredibly amazing.

A quick history of the museum:
By 1897 handmade objects were being discarded in favor of new machine-made goods. Historian and archaeologist Henry Mercer (1856-1930) recognized the need to collect and preserve the outmoded material of daily life in America before it was swept away by the Industrial Revolution. Mercer gathered almost 30,000 items ranging from hand tools to horse-drawn vehicles and assembled this encyclopedic collection in a system of his own devising. To enhance the collection’s educational value, and to share it with the public, Mercer decided to design and build a museum to display the artifacts. In 1916, Mercer erected this 6-story concrete castle to house them all.

Here’s just a few of the things that caught my eye!