I recently visited the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Here’s an introduction from the website:
The Mercer Museum … features local and national traveling exhibits, as well as a core museum collection of over 50,000 pre-Industrial tools. This permanent collection offers visitors a unique window into pre-Industrial America through sixty different crafts and trades, and is one of the world’s most comprehensive portraits of pre-Industrial American material culture…
In other words, the Mercer is great-great-grandpa’s tool shed.
Pre-modern technology gets little mainstream attention, especially mundane tools for home use and cottage industries. I suspect this ignorance is starting to change (perhaps a topic for another post), but for now the subject is still underground. There’s a rich vein of history for you to unearth. So If you’re near Philadelphia and have fifteen bucks and a few hours to spare, I say give the Mercer a chance. I took some pictures to give you a taste of what you’re missing.
Fred Watts 