The night Henry Mercer tried to burn down his Doylestown castle
The alarm came in just after dusk. The glow of a big fire illuminated the sky north of Doylestown’s business district. Panic spread with reports of a barn or a home on fire on East Court Street about a half-mile away. At the central fire station on Shewell Avenue firefighters joined forces to muscle four wagons loaded with ladders, chemical fire retardant and water hoses through the streets as warning bells raised the alarm. A mob of spectators ran behind.
What they found was a shock.
A roaring bonfire had erupted on the roof of the city’s 7-story gothic castle. Set back from the road by a vast lawn and backdropped by a forest, Fonthill was a formidable sight that night of June 23, 1910. Those on the street stared in disbelief. They knew Henry Chapman Mercer was eccentric. A classmate in college described him as “handsome, winning, interesting – and odd.” With inherited wealth, the life-long bachelor built the castle for him and his Chesapeake Bay retriever Rollo. But why set a bonfire on the tower of his new home? Was he up there roasting hot dogs to share with his dog?
Flash forward to my meeting with Kyle McKoy at the castle a few years ago. She’s CEO of the Bucks County Historical Society that manages Fonthill. I asked if we could visit the rooftop where Henry set the fire. “Sure” and off we went through a few of the castle’s 44 rooms. In the Wind Room, we started up a narrow, cement stairwell with the words “Rollo’s Stairs” and a paw print set on the first three steps. The passage spirals to a small terracotta vestibule opening to a square terrazzo surrounded by a protective parapet, the highest point of the castle complex. There we looked down on sandstone roofs of lower levels. Far below was the lawn stretching to distant East Court Street where firefighters and spectators gawked that warm June night.
More: Explore the 5 castles of Bucks County, and a bonus castle nearby
Kyle and I knew why Henry Mercer torched the building. As an acknowledged expert in European archeology and anthropology, he was a Renaissance man who shared the same birthday of June 24 as St. John the Baptist of the Christian religion. Traditionally, Europeans light a “St. John’s Fire” on the eve before the annual celebration. Mercer followed the same tradition in Doylestown. But why a bonfire on the roof of his new castle rather than out on the lawn?
The answer traces to Elizabeth Chapman Lawrence. From youth, Henry often traveled with “Auntie Lela” in Europe where her husband was American diplomat T. Bigelow Lawrence of Boston. His premature death from illness left Lela a fortune. She endowed Henry’s education at Harvard and Penn plus his avocation as a collector of historical artifacts. Of great interest to him was Lela’s collection of Medieval body armor stored in Boston. Unfortunately, a fire on Nov. 9, 1872, ravaged the city. Flames destroyed 776 buildings including the precious armor stored in one of them.
Mercer long dreaded how fire could imperil his own collection. With his inheritance, he built a cavernous 9-story museum in Doylestown for his collection of 55,000 early American, European and Indian artifacts. The monolith, completed in 1916, is entirely constructed of reinforced, poured concrete. Henry similarly began construction of Fonthill in 1908. Two years later he set his St. John’s Fire to prove to the world his castle like his museum a mile away was indestructible.
In the aftermath, Henry sent a letter of apology to the fire company with a check for $20. The fire gained wide notoriety including commentary by Cement Age magazine: “This is the sort of story that is causing the insurance man to sit up and take notice, and likewise the citizen who wants an indestructible house.”
Sources include “November Nights: The Legacy of Henry Chapman Mercer” by Mattthew Omelesky published Dec. 29, 2023 at Spectacle Podcast; “A Concrete Love Affair” by Amy Knecht published April 28, 2023 in the Beacon, and “Henry Chapman Mercer” by Nancy Freudenethal published by Harvard Magazine in its January-February 2018 issue. Thanks also to Cory Amsler of the Bucks County Historical Society for pointing me in the right direction.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: The night Henry Mercer tried to burn down his Doylestown castle
