Henry Chapman Mercer and the Search Jor American History

Henry Chapman Mercer and the Search jor American History HE ENTRANCE FOYER TO THE MERCER MUSEUM in Doyles- town, Pennsylvania serves as a kind of shrine to Doylestown's Tpatron saint: Henry Chapman Mercer. The display depicts Mercer the archaeologist, Mercer the collector, Mercer die museolo- gist. In short, with photographs, wall text, and exhibits behind plexi- glass, we are presented with Henry Mercer, the eccentric, turn-of-the- century renaissance man. In a life that began just before the Civil War (1856) and ended at the beginning of the Depression (1930), Mercer's pursuits were indeed wide-ranging. After early abandoning a career in the law, Mercer became an important American archaeologist in the 1880s and 1890s. Toward the end of the nineties, he began to collect the tools and technology of colonial and early federal America. He eventually housed these artifacts in a museum of his own extraordinary design that he built for the Bucks County Historical Society in 1916. At the turn of the century, Mercer began experimenting with ceramic production by trying to resurrect an old German technique for pottery manufacture. As a result, he established the Moravian Tile Works near his home in Doylestown. The tiles he produced there have been installed in buildings as diverse as the State Capitol in Harrisburg; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and the Casino in Monte Carlo. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Mercer never considered himself primarily an archaeologist, a collector, or a cerami- cist. Nor was he simply a "renaissance man" who had the means to dabble widely. Mercer thought of himself primarily as a historian, and that is what gave coherence to all of his activities. He spent his life in an attempt to study the history of America through objects. He wanted The author thanks the staff of the Bucks County Historical Society} Professors Drew Faust and Michael Zuckcrman for their patience and encouragement; Peter and Terry Conn for their frequent and varied support; David Conn for his keen eyes; and most especially Abby Letcher who kept reminding the author how much fun this project was. THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXVI, No. 3 Quly 1992) 324 STEVEN CONN July Henry Mercer, pictured here in the 1920s, dedicated his career to telling the history of ordinary Americans through the objects they left behind. Courtesy of the Spruance Library, Bucks County Historical Society. nothing less than to create a new kind of historiography that would tell the story of ordinary Americans in a new and "objective" way. In a theme written for a Harvard class, Mercer recalled an "excava- tion" he undertook when he was a boy. The theme reveals some of the romance and sense of discovery that made archaeology so appeal- ing. During the summer in question, Mercer had hoped to find an ancient camping ground of the Lenni Lenape, which was supposed to have been located near Mercer's house along the Delaware river. He writes: Thus far every exploration had turned out a mere wild-goose chase, [still] I often thought of mysterious amulets, and murderous tomahawks buried, no one knew where, and could fancy myself in the act of unearthing the sacred bones and war paraphernalia, of some renowned sachem—any perhaps; but it all came to nothing until one day in August. Out fishing at a favorite spot after some high water on the river, Mercer spotted several arrowheads revealed by erosion. Mercer continues: 1992 HENRY CHAPMAN MERCER 325 I had not yet given up all hopes of the Indian camp—I [left the place and] soon returned with a shovel from a farm house; and, there, in that ground, so often trodden by me, in profane unconsciousness, I began to dig. Then came to light arrowheads, by the dozen, broken, but precious, fragments of rude vessels, and savage implements of war, and the chase, that had lain hidden there since the red man bade farewell to the spot. It took a week of digging to exhaust the relics; but after that I was satisfied; I had found the Indian camp.1 When Mercer graduated from Harvard in 1879, he had not decided to become a historian. Instead, his well-to-do Bucks County family expected him to pursue a career in the law, and to that end he studied at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Apparently, law did not hold much appeal, and Mercer spent a great deal of the early 1880s touring Europe with friends and relatives. In between his travels and his law studies, Mercer participated in the founding of the Bucks County Historical Society in 1880, and he read his first paper there in 1884. Mercer, who had had a childhood interest in Native-American culture, published his first book The Len- afe Stone, or the Indian and the Mammoth in 1885. The book is a detailed consideration of what was then a controversial archaeological discovery, and it marked Mercer's professional entry into the field of archaeology. At the time of the book's publication, American archaeologists were unable to provide answers to two fundamental questions about Native- American history: how long had Indians been on the continent and where did they come from? Archaeology in Europe served to provide the details of human development within an established framework, whether that framework was the Danish Three Age system or biblical and classical texts.2 American archaeology, however, was somewhat less tidy. From Columbus's first encounter, Euro-Americans were not quite sure what to make of the native population. 1 "An Incident in My Life," Mercer Papers, Bucks County Historical Society (hereafter, BCHS), ser. 4, fol. 12. 2 Essentially, European archaeologists followed two courses. Some uncovered the remains of the great civilizations of Egypt, the Near East, and the Mediterranean. Others studied prehistoric Europe, and their discoveries expanded upon the Three Age system—Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age—formulated by Danish archaeologists. 326 STEVEN CONN July In America archaeologists tried valiantly to fit Native Americans into these same frameworks. Speculations that the Indians constituted some part of Israel's lost tribes were particularly popular. More imagi- native still was the hypothesis of M.V. Moore who, in an article written for the Magazine of American History in 1884, asked the archaeological question: "Did the Romans Colonize America?" After some extraordinary philological analysis that demonstrated "Indian familiarity with terms having origin in languages antedating the Latin," he concluded that indeed they did.3 The systematic application of scientifically rigorous archaeology by men like Mercer and John Wesley Powell4 would sort this situation out. Writing for the Smithsonian Forum in 1890, Major Powell out- lined the solution to the question of Native-American antiquity: "We must discover the first appearance of mankind in the several regions of the continent. The evidence must rest on geologic facts."5 By the 1890s archaeologists were confident that their science could provide the answers to these basic questions, and with the publication of The Lenafe Stone Henry Mercer placed himself squarely in the middle of these debates. The stone itself was a gorget with Indian figures and a mammoth incised on one face. The central question about the stone was its authenticity. If it were genuine, it would demonstrate that Native Americans existed contemporaneously with extinct mega-fauna. This, in turn, would establish an antiquity for Native Americans that was significantly older than had heretofore been accepted. Mercer concluded, after exhaustive analysis, that the gorget's age could not be proved one way or the other. With this book, Mercer established himself as a careful, deliberate, and scientific archaeologist. The book also demonstrated the concern Mercer would have throughout the rest of his life for the significance of objects. In the nearly 100 pages of the book, Mercer considered things as minute as 3 M.V. Moore, "Did the Romans Colonize America," Kansas City Review of Science and Industry 8 (1884-85), 236-43. 4 Powell was the first head of the United States Bureau of Ethnology and later headed the United States Geologic Survey. 5 J.W. Powell "Problems of American Archaeology," Smithsonian Forum 8 (1889-90), 638-39. 1992 HENRY CHAPMAN MERCER 327 the depth and shape of the stone's incision marks, but he was clearly more interested in broader issues. He developed an idea that the stone might illustrate the creation story of the Lenni Lenape. As he would go on to do repeatedly, Mercer used a single object to tell the story of a whole civilization. In 1890 Mercer became a member of the newly formed Archaeolog- ical Association of the University of Pennsylvania. This Association developed into the University Museum, and in 1891 Mercer was named one of ten managers of the new Museum. Under its auspices, Mercer pursued the question of Native-American antiquity with re- markable energy. In Europe human antiquity had been established by the discovery in caves of human tools in association with extinct mega-fauna. Mercer undertook to make similar discoveries in America. In 1892-93 he traveled to Europe to investigate paleolithic cave sites in France and Spain.6 Between 1891-98, Mercer excavated cave and mound sites in Maine, West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, and the Yucatan in addition to local sites in eastern Pennsylvania and along the Dela- ware River. In 1894 Mercer was appointed Curator of American and Prehistoric Archaeology at the Museum. A year earlier, in 1893, Mercer began as assistant editor for the Department of Archaeology and Ethnology for the American Naturalist, a prestigious scientific journal.

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