Visit the Eccentric Fonthill Castle Built Out of Cement and Trash in Bucks County, PA
Story by Cassie Hepler, photos courtesy of Fonthill Castle
Fonthill, also known as Fonthill Castle, was the home of the American archeologist and tile maker Henry Chapman Mercer, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Upon his death in 1930, the eccentric Mercer left his concrete “Castle for the New World” in trust as a museum of decorative tiles and prints. There is also the adjacent Mercer Museum where they still make tiles to this day.
While you are not normally allowed to take photographs inside, we were invited on a Bucks Country press trip (along with fellow fitness retreats Ketanga Fitness), and were allowed to shoot and poke around more than usual. Once you start exploring, you can clearly see that the man was crazy – but in a creative way. He also had a touch of OCD as everything inside the castle is numbered and archived… or perhaps he always knew it would end up as a museum. Cozy and homey do not fit the description for this space as it is made out of trash and concrete. He even went so far as to have a bonfire on top of the castle to show it would never burn down only the have the town firemen come and douse it out. He then donated money to them as some sort of sorry I’m crazy and thank you for cleaning up my mess.
He was certainly of ahead of his time with a “green” castle. There are 44 rooms of all shapes and sizes in Fonthill including 10 bathrooms; 5 bedrooms; at least 32 stairwells; 18 fireplaces; and 21 chimneys and air vents. Mercer loved art from around the world and incorporated his own tiles into Fonthill’s architecture as well as Persian, Chinese, Spanish, and Dutch tiles he had collected and more than 900 prints (of the 5,000 that Mercer collected from around the world) are displayed. A well-read worldly man, he had built-in bookcases that hold more than 6,000 books, some still originals today.
Fonthill is visited by more than 30,000 people from around the world annually and has been featured on the A & E Channel’s “America’s Castle” program and in 2016, Fonthill was designated as a Smithsonian Affiliate.
Fonthill has evolved into a unique professional museum that provides a full range of museum programs related to Mercer and his collections while maintaining a strong commitment to the preservation and conservation of the building and its collections. Fonthill is designated a National Historic Landmark and the site is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Today, Fonthill attracts over 30,000 visitors annually from every state and more than 35 foreign countries. The site has been featured in numerous print and electronic media including the Arts & Entertainment Network’s popular “America’s Castles” series. Fonthill is one of the original associate sites of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program. In 2012 the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia recognized the 100th anniversary of Fonthill with a historic preservation award for stewardship presented to the Bucks County Historical Society.
