Moravian Pottery and Tile Works: Art and Innovation

Where Gumbo Was #400

This is a story about a unique industrial facility, for many years a center for some of the country’s most-renowned artistic tile work. It’s also a story about its unique origins, and at bottom, a story about the inquisitive and obsessive artist-poet-archaeologist-historian-collector-architect-industrialist-lawyer who willed it into being: Henry Chapman Mercer.

The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is clearly, even at first glance, an unusual building. It has the outward form of a Spanish mission, but it’s made of rough poured concrete. Mercer believed in poured concrete; he even thought it beautiful and mocked friends and critics who thought it could use a little smoothing and a coat of paint.

His nearby house, which we’ll tour in a later blog, and his iconic museum a mile away are all cut of the same cloth, and designed by Mercer himself.But don’t imagine that concrete was the end of his vision; this building owes its existence to Mercer’s falling in love with traditional German-style pottery craft that was widely practiced in Pennsylvania before his time. Through the Bucks County Historical Society, which he helped found, he began collecting. In a big way. And when he realized the craft was being lost, he plunged in to save it.

Mercer did things in a whole-hearted, even obsessive way: Trained as a lawyer but never practicing, he took an interest in antiquities while traveling in Europe, and came home eight years later to head the archaeology and paleontology programs at the University of Pennsylvania.

From archaeology he turned to pre-industrial America: he explained he was going into ‘archaeology turned upside down’ and began collecting artifacts by the thousands, including cast-iron stove plates used in Pennsylvania Dutch homes.

When he started in on pottery, he left his other occupations behind, or at least to the side, and apprenticed himself to one of the last of the old-style craftsmen. Within a few years, he had become a master, and one of the leading ceramicists of the Arts and Crafts movement of the time.

Given Mercer’s history so far, you’ll not be surprised that having become a potter, he decided he needed a new pottery, designed to produce tiles in massive quantities by traditional methods, and with designs created by, of course, Henry Chapman Mercer.

Congratulations to George G and PortMoresby who identified it!

And while the new pottery was a vast expanse of poured concrete, it also became a canvas to display the tiles being made within, not only on the multiple chimneys (one for each kiln) but on the outside walls. The ones below are set high on a wall at the entrance to the building; they can be seen in the next picture, just under the eaves.

Other outdoor tiles get a little more privacy than that gallery. Here are four more outdoor views before we go inside.

You’ll probably have noticed the variety of styles and subjects. Mercer was not only diverse in his interests and knowledge, he was a shrewd enough businessman to know that variety would help sell tiles. And his background in ancient worlds added to that; he collected tiles from ancient civilizations and incorporated motifs from them in his work; he also worked from paintings and, frequently, from ideas embodied in his two-thousand-plus old stove plates. As the stove plates were of Moravian origin, he took the name for his business.

But let’s step inside, where the present-day tour of the Tile Works begins (Mercer decided early that the local clay wasn’t suited for other pottery, and never made much of it). A large room with a huge fireplace displays many examples of Mercer’s work, and many samples of tiles he collected.

Now look up. As you’ll know if you’ve visited or read about the Mercer Museum, the man couldn’t stand to waste space if he could display something. As at the museum, the walls and ceiling are covered with collections.

Closer to eye level, it’s mostly tiles, and mostly, but not exclusively tiles from Moravian; the large room served as a reception hall and showplace for the products, which were widely used in important buildings, including the Rockefeller estates in New York, the casino at Monte Carlo, and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. Most famously, Mercer made 16,000 square feet of tile representing Pennsylvania history to pave the rotunda of the State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Mercer was not above a joke now and then, sometimes in German. The staircase below (almost all the staircases there and in his home have tile edges). This one says, logically, ‘I climb.’ The one below carries the legend ‘not worth judging.’ I have no clue… His wit also extended to literary criticism, by the way; the flyleaf of his copy of Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ was noted “As convincing as a tapeworm. As charming as a bottle of dead flies.”

Walking through the halls and rooms of the Pottery, some areas feel like museum display; others feel as if you’d walked into a busy works on a weekend when the staff is off. There’s a lot to see!

Ship designs were popular in the Arts and Crafts period and Mercer had several series of ships, including the Mayflower, and Columbus’s three ships, above.
A group of four tiles from 1913, ‘The Seine and Fishes’ shows fish caught in a net. Above, finished and assembled, below, waiting for glaze and firing.

Literary inspirations: Goose Girl, left is from a Grimm fairy tale; Priscilla with her drop spindle, is from Longfellow’s ‘Courtship of Miles Standish’

The elaborate image on the wall is a tile mosaic of an old woman dipping candles. Chapman started from an old engraving in creating the large work; the mold for the clay image is mounted to the right.

On the second floor, a row of kilns, each with its own chimney. Larger, walk-in kilns are in the basement.

Mercer as mechanic: he designed the tile press, top, to form tiles in molds faster and he adapted the small kiln below, originally made for baking dentures, as a test kiln for tiles.

As you might have guessed from the unfired ‘Seine and Fishes’ above, the Moravian is still in business, sort of. When Mercer died in 1930, he left the works to his long-time assistant, who continued operating it to produce Mercer tiles, though no new designs. In the early 1960s, it ceased operations and in 1966 the Bucks County Parks and Recreation department acquired the building and began operating it as a museum.

By the 1970s, it began making tiles again, with a training program and apprenticeships, just as Mercer had started nearly a century before. All the molds are still on hand and the tiles made in the program are sold in the Tile Shop at the museum. Mercer never marked the back of his tiles; the new ones are all marked—and also have something Mercer’s never did, the small opening above the hallmark is to allow hanging the tiles on a picture hook.

Most of the equipment used at the Moravian Pottery today is original, including the clay mixer, which was rebuilt before the works resumed in 1975. Other machinery includes steam pumps and boilers. Below, the clay pit, where clay is stored until ready for use.

Different parts of the work are done at stations along a hallway; above the hand-painting room and below four stages in production of some of the clay figures.

Four stages in creation. The raw clay, unfired, is greenware; after the first firing it’s bisque. After the first firing glaze is applied, and it’s fired again.

And scenes in the Tile Shop. While I was there, one or two people were looking for souvenirs, but most of the customers had dimensions for their kitchen backsplashes, their bathroom walls, and more. After all these years, it’s clear that Mercer was on to a good thing.

If you decide to visit, put aside a whole day. You’ll probably spend an hour or so at the Moravian Pottery, but it’s on the same site as Fonthill Castle, Mercer’s concrete home, with a lot more tile and a lot of interesting innovations, and, yes, concrete everywhere else (although he did have wood floor sections next to beds so visitors could have a warm place to put their feet in the morning.)

Also in Doylestown, of course, is the Mercer Museum, about a mile away, and almost too fascinating to leave, but you’ll want to because almost next door is the James A Michener Art Museum, with an important collection of regional artists of the past hundred years or so as well as contemporary exhibitions.