Elkins Gallery at Mercer Museum

The Mercer Museum contains a collection of folk art and colonial artifacts from the early days of settlement in the Delaware Valley region. Housed in a towering stone castle, the museum offers a look at pioneer days and the history of the United States prior to the Revolution.

In the center of town, the Mercer Museum, opened in 1916, displays Mercer's collection of tools, including more than 50,000 objects from before the steam age. An archaeologist, Mercer worried that the rapid advance of industrialization would wipe out evidence of preindustrial America. Consequently, from 1895 to 1915 he scoured the back roads of eastern Pennsylvania, buying folk art, tools, and...

In Short
Henry Mercer established the museum near his Moravian tile works in 1913 as a repository for his tool collection, which he began as a means of pursuing his anthropological...

Experience a concrete castle full of treasures at the Mercer Museum, a museum specially built by Henry Mercer to house his extensive collection of early American tools. You can also experience the newly opened wing and exhibit, "A World of Things: Henry Mercer A-Z."

Mercer Museum:\nBy 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. In 1916, Mercer erected a 6-story concrete castle. On each level exhibits were installed in a warren of alcoves, niches and rooms highlighting various...