Doylestown
"Doylestown looks like someone smuggled a piece of Gaudí's Barcelona into Bucks County and let it set in concrete."
A Bucks County county-seat town built almost entirely from poured concrete by one eccentric archaeologist a century ago, its castle-like museum and tile works looking more like Barcelona than eastern Pennsylvania. Lia and I spent an afternoon getting lost in a concrete labyrinth of a house and came out convinced Doylestown is the strangest town in the state.
Nothing about Doylestown’s tidy brick Main Street prepares you for what’s a short walk away. This is the seat of Bucks County, an hour north of Philadelphia, a town of handsome nineteenth-century storefronts and a county courthouse dome you can see from blocks off — until you turn a corner and find Fonthill Castle, a forty-four-room concrete mansion built between 1908 and 1912 by the archaeologist and tile-maker Henry Chapman Mercer. Lia had read about it in a guidebook margin note and insisted we go; I went in skeptical and came out rearranging my whole idea of what an American eccentric could build with nothing but poured concrete and stubbornness.
Inside Fonthill Castle
Mercer designed Fonthill without blueprints, working room by room from sketches, and it shows in the best possible way — no hallway meets another at a predictable angle, staircases spiral off into unexpected turrets, and every ceiling is embedded with his own hand-glazed tiles depicting everything from Columbus’s ships to Aesop’s fables. Our guide told us Mercer built the whole structure using local farm laborers and a horse named Lucy to haul materials, refusing modern construction crews on principle. We spent nearly two hours inside and still felt like we’d missed rooms.
The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works
Just down the hill, Mercer built a working tile factory modeled after a Spanish mission, and it still produces handmade tiles using his original molds and methods. We watched a potter press wet clay into a century-old mold for a design of a heron, the same pattern that lines fireplaces and floors across half the grand buildings in this part of Pennsylvania, including the state capitol in Harrisburg. Lia bought two small tiles from the gift shop, one of which now sits on our kitchen windowsill in Mexico, a strange little souvenir of a man who apparently never met a plain wall he could leave alone.
Getting There
Doylestown is about an hour north of Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) by car via I-95 and Route 611, and it’s also reachable by SEPTA regional rail from Center City Philadelphia, which makes it doable as a car-free day trip. If you want to see all three Mercer sites — Fonthill, the Tile Works, and the Mercer Museum downtown — a car makes the day easier, but it’s not strictly required.
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