Henry C. Mercer

American sculptor, scholar, and anthropologist, 1856-1930

Mercer, Henry Chapman (24 June 1856-9 Mar. 1930), archaeologist, collector, and tilemaker, was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the son of William Robert Mercer, a naval officer, and Mary Rebecca Chapman. His father retired from the navy to become a gentleman farmer and gardener. His mother's sister, Elizabeth, came into a sizable fortune when her husband, Timothy Bigelow Lawrence of Boston, serving as a diplomat in Italy, died in 1869. Cultured and widely traveled, and with no children of her own, she returned to Doylestown and became a major influence in the lives of Mercer's family, underwriting the costs of his education and travels. Mercer graduated from Harvard University in 1879 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Although admitted to the Philadelphia County Bar in 1881, he never practiced law. Mercer never married or had children.

Mercer's adult life consisted of a sequence of major projects all interconnected by his love of history and all undertaken with an almost religious fervor. In the 1880s he traveled extensively in Europe and Egypt, making long journeys by raft and houseboat down the Danube, Rhone, and Loire rivers. During these travels he took photographs, kept journals, and collected cultural artifacts.

Until the late 1890s he lived the life of a gentleman scholar, focusing his interest on the material culture of the New World and the existence of original man in the Delaware Valley. His first archaeological monograph, The Lenape Stone, or the Indian and the Mammoth (1885), a study of a prehistoric artifact found in a local farmer's field, crystalized his thinking about the historical significance of material culture and established him as an important ethnologist.

In 1891 he was invited to join the curatorial staff of the University of Pennsylvania Museum's newly formed Department of Archaeology and Paleontology, where he served until 1897. For the next six years, he explored sites in the Delaware Valley looking without success for evidence of prehistoric toolmaking that would prove the existence of what he termed "original" man in the United States. In 1893 the Spanish government awarded him a bronze medal for his exhibit of American Indian specimens at the Exposición Histórico-Americana at Madrid. In 1893 he was elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and in 1895 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. His fieldwork led to a steady flow of scholarly papers and he was an associate editor of American Naturalist from 1893 to 1897. He dug in archaeological sites in Maine, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee. In 1895 he led the Corwith Expedition to the Yucatán, publishing his findings in Hill Caves of the Yucatan in 1896. In that year he left the museum, disgruntled with the politics that were involved. He moved his work to his studio, "Indian House," in Doylestown, and published Researches Upon the Antiquity of Man in the Delaware Valley and the Eastern United States in 1897.

Now unaffiliated with any institution, he turned his attention to the affairs of the Bucks County Historical Society, which he helped found in 1880. When, by chance, he attended a penny-lot sale of junk, looking for used fireplace tongs, he was seized with the idea that the cast-off implements of pioneer settlers were in fact archaeological specimens of preindustrial American life that lent themselves to the intellectual and methodological processes that he had used with prehistoric objects. These "Tools of the Nation Maker," as he later described them, satisfied his need to link antiquity to modern man. He continued collecting, cataloging, and exhibiting these implements, as well as writing about them, until his death.

While searching for potter's tools in 1897 he discovered a nearly extinct redware craft tradition. In attempting to resuscitate a local Pennsylvania-German pottery as a living history adjunct to the historical society, he began to work in clay himself, soon settling on decorative tile forms. In 1898, after preliminary experiments, he established the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, named to honor early settlers of Bucks County. He developed and patented a handwork system of manufacturing relief-decorated tiles. These pictorial tiles for pavings and fireplaces were an immediate success with his architect friends in Philadelphia and Boston, where the new aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts Movement demanded handcrafted products. They influenced the work of other important American tilemakers, including William Grueby, Mary Chase Perry, Ernest Batchelder, and Herman Carl Mueller. His handcrafted tile operation became a successful business, supplying tiles for installations throughout the United States. He adapted many of his early designs from medieval English tiles that he had seen at the British Museum. In 1902 he devised and patented a process for making tile mosaics--akin to the design of stained glass windows--for a large decorative pavement he was commissioned to create for the new Pennsylvania Commonwealth Capitol building in Harrisburg. He drew heavily on his collection of tools for the imagery of nearly 400 mosaics depicting the life and lore of Pennsylvania. In 1904 his tiles won a grand prize at the St. Louis World's Fair. In 1906 he developed his "brocade" style of tiles in which pictorial elements cut in silhouette and modeled in deep relief formed pictures in a background of concrete. This style grew out of his increasing interest in concrete as a primary building material.

Mercer described himself as a rediscoverer of the past. He expressed his discoveries in his tiles. He viewed storytelling--his term for any literary program underlying a work of art--as his essential task. He meant his tiles to be beautiful but never at the cost of surrendering their meanings. As he moved beyond simple relief tiles in standard geometric forms to his mosaic style and then on to sculptural brocades he gained the ability to treat increasingly complex subjects. Through his major theme, the discovery of the New World, he created a new American iconography in tiles. Retiring by nature and disinclined to associate with other makers of decorative objects, he nonetheless became through his tiles a major figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement.

In 1907 Mercer began an architectural career at age fifty-one with the design and construction of the first of his three state-of-the-art exposed, reinforced-concrete buildings. This was his residence, Fonthill, a structure inspired by his "literary and artistic dreams, and memories of travel" (quoted in Memorial Services, p. 39). In 1911 and 1912 he designed and oversaw the construction of a new tile works, modeled after California missions. In 1916 he completed and presented to the Bucks County Historical Society a fireproof museum of his own unconventional design to house his now vast tool collection, which remains preeminent in its field. He pioneered the method of visible storage, in which he arranged artifacts in open display, making the entire collection accessible for study.

The Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, of which he was a master craftsman, awarded him its bronze medal for excellence in 1913. In 1916 he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Franklin and Marshall College. In 1921 the American Institute of Architects awarded him its gold medal for distinguished achievements in ceramic art. He continued his active life as a scholar, collector, and writer all the while creating new designs for his thriving tile works. After his last European trip in 1904 he became more reclusive and was periodically beset with illness. He died in Doylestown. The Arts and Crafts Guild of Philadelphia awarded him its first Master Craftsman Medal a month after his death.

His tile works continued to operate under the supervision of his assistant since 1897, Frank Swain, who with his wife Laura resided at Fonthill for many years, preserving Mercer's legacy. The Bucks County Department of Parks and Recreation acquired it in 1967 to operate as a living history museum.

Mercer played a key role in the revitalization of the decorative ceramic tile as an element of architecture, was a major promoter of the Arts and Crafts Movement's handcraft ideology, and innovated the use of exposed reinforced concrete in building construction. In addition, he created a major museum of American preindustrial implements and wrote seminal books on the material culture of Colonial America that remain standard references in the field.

Bibliography

Mercer's papers are in the Spruance Library of the Bucks County Historical Society in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Mercer published ten books, including The Bible in Iron (1914), The Origin of Log Houses in the United States (1926), and Ancient Carpenter's Tools (1929), and over 170 articles, reviews, papers, reports, monographs, and other publications. His buildings, Fonthill, the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, and the Mercer Museum, all located in Doylestown, are primary sources for the study of his architecture and his tiles. All are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and open to the public year-round. The first comprehensive study of his life and work is Cleota Reed, Henry Chapman Mercer and the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works (1987), based on a study of primary sources. It contains a bibliography of Mercer's publications. Obituaries and remembrances are collected in Bucks County Historical Society, Memorial Services (1930).

Cleota Reed

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