Castles of "United States" MERCER MUSEUM vs MONTEZUMA CASTLE

MERCER MUSEUM

The Mercer Museum is a museum located in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, United States. The Bucks County Historical Society operates the Mercer Museum, as w...

The Mercer Museum is a museum located in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, United States. The Bucks County Historical Society operates the Mercer Museum, as well as the Research Library, and Fonthill Castle, former home of the museum's founder, archeologist Henry Chapman Mercer. The museum was individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was later included in a National Historic Landmark District along with the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works and Fonthill. These three structures are the only poured-in-place concrete structures built by Mercer. Henry Mercer was a gentleman anthropologist. On a cruise up the Ruhr in early adulthood, Mercer was impressed by the eclipse of artisanal culture by industrial production, and resolved himself to preserving artifacts of preindustrial life. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mercer collected pre-industrial hand tools and other implements of the past. He believed that the story of human progress and accomplishments was told by the tools and objects that people used and saw these time-honored crafts slowly disappearing from memory. Mercer personally designed plans for a museum to house his collection, six stories tall and cast of poured-in-place concrete. Mercer's museum was completed in 1916. In addition to tools, it displays furnishings of early America, carriages, stove plates, a gallows, antique fire engines, a whaleboat, and the Lenape Stone. The Spruance Library, which houses the Bucks County Historical Society's archive of historical research materials, is located on its third floor. In June 2011, construction was completed on a new, extensive visitors center at the front of the museum.

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MONTEZUMA CASTLE

The Montezuma Castle is a 90,000-square-foot (8,400 m2), 400 room Queen Anne style hotel building erected just northwest of the city of Las Vegas, New...

The Montezuma Castle is a 90,000-square-foot (8,400 m2), 400 room Queen Anne style hotel building erected just northwest of the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1886 (the site was at the time called "Las Vegas Hot Springs," but is now known as "Montezuma"). The current castle is actually the third on the site, the first two (dating to 1881 and 1885) were the first buildings in New Mexico to have electric lighting, and they both burned down. The castle was constructed by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad as a luxury hotel, capitalizing on the natural hot springs on the site. These were widely thought to ease the suffering of people with tuberculosis, "chronic rheumatism, gout, biliary, and renal calculi." The nearby Gallinas Creek also provided excellent trout fishing. Guests included Theodore Roosevelt, Rutherford B. Hayes, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, John C. Frémont, and Jesse James (who stayed at a predecessor hotel on the same property). Later articles would cite an improbable array of foreign dignitaries as having been guests, including Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. However, some members of European royal families certainly did visit, including Henry Manners, 8th Duke of Rutland, John Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll, and his wife, Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll. "The visitors to the Hot Springs represent every part of the continent of America, and nearly every tourist from abroad who crosses the continent by the southerly route stops there for a time." In addition to the natural recreation available in Montezuma, the hotel provided bowling alleys and billiard rooms. The building was designed and construction was overseen by the Chicago architecture firm Burnham and Root.

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