Mercer Museum - The Bucks County Historical Society

Conveniently across the street from the Michener Art Museum is one of the strangest buildings I've ever seen:

This building houses the Mercer Museum. It was purpose built to hold the Bucks County Historical Society's collection of 18th and 19th century tools, crafts and vehicles. It is made out of concrete and over 200 windows and appears at first, and maybe second glance to be the work of a madman. Henry Mercer built the castle in 1917 to house the growing assortment of goods that he was collecting. As a Harvard trained Anthropologist and Archeologist he sought to preserve the artifacts from the historical way of life in Bucks County that was rapidly being put aside in favor of modern technology and innovation.

Being a trained Anthropologist and Archeologist he classified all the objects he collected by their use and function (tinsmithing tools in one room, whaling tools in another) and created rooms and alcoves to display these objects.

Due to extremely rare signage and explanations, this creates an interesting challenge for the visitor as you try to discover the common theme of the objects, most of which are not labeled. Also, to add to the weirdness and discomfort of the visitor, many of the objects are displayed upside down and hanging from the ceiling. (I'm actually not sure if this picture is correctly oriented as I don't remember which way was up. But this picture shows a Chaise cart and a sleigh hung from the walls)

Henry Mercer chose to disorient the visitor so that they would experience every day objects that they had grown up with in a new and different light and perhaps through this gain a better understanding and appreciation of the world around them.

Most of this information I picked up after I had gone through nearly the whole 6 floors of the museum. The woman at the front desk had been very gruff and uninterested in being welcoming and helpful, despite my asking, and had directed us to make sure we went to the 6th floor to see some old pictures of gas stations. Being given this information and a map, we headed up the elevator to the 6th floor with no idea what we were walking into. On the first floor, had we been directed properly, there was a very good introductory video and an exhibit about the organization and creation of the museum, which would have been helpful to know before venturing into what otherwise appears to be insanity.

The themes on the sixth floor are also some of the weirdest in the whole museum: a large collection of wrought iron stove plates, a room about education, a room with a solar salt mill, a room about punishment, and a room about death rituals. You walk from a very random collection of stove plates (which I didn't even determine were in fact stove plates for the first 15 minutes I was in there) to a room with stoves and various other machinery, to a room that has this weird wooden structure that you have to walk through, when you reach the other side of the room you realize you have just walked under a gallows, right where the dead body would drop through the opening in the floor. In the room is also a collection of torture devices and restrainments. Through this room you are lead to a room that has coffins and hearses, which took me a few minutes of staring at to register as well, and then a room done up as a one room school house. Remembering that this is all in the attic of a weird, strange cement building that has uneven floors and weird stairways to alcoves full of unidentified objects, I was understandably extremely confused and questioning the sanity of the entire experience. I was left feeling extremely ill at ease and we nearly left.

Here is a high resolution picture of the stove plate room, which was my first experience in this place