Quirky PA

While on vacation we ventured to two places in Pennsylvania that were a bit on the odd side, which of course means I enjoyed them. The first place was the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, which was was founded by glazed tile baron, Henry Chapman Mercer to house his collection of pre-industrial artifacts. To do so he built his own six story castle out of cast concrete to protect his efforts from fire. I am sure Mercer intended us to look at his collections, which included all kinds of tools, lamps, furniture, wagons, and many other things, as long as they were made by hand. However, I was as equally intrigued by the building, which was very odd with stairs going this way and that, odd little windows, narrow passageways and items were stuffed everywhere. In the center is a great hall that is open to the roof, but is chocked full of suspended whaling vessels, carriages, wagons and furniture hanging from the ceiling. It was delightfully disorienting as if the laws of gravity did not apply here and reminded me of MC Escher's Relativity.

This photo was from the Mercer's web site and shows the building under construction in 1915.

The other quirky place we went was Ringing Rocks Park in northern Bucks County. The centerpiece of this park is a 5 acre field of boulders in the middle of the woods where one out of three boulders ring like a bell when struck with a hammer or another rock. The whole place is very mysterious and several web sources say that no plant will grow in the boulder field (though I did see a dead sapling), birds will not fly over it and animals will not cross it. The average depth of the boulder field is about 14' which makes the fact that nothing grows there not so mysterious and without plants you would not expect to see any animals. I do wonder though what forces brought these boulders here and concentrated them. As to the ringing, no one is exactly sure, but most believe it has to do with their composition and geological stress. Whatever, it was cheap fun.

Addendum: I thank my firiend Chris who found the following explanation of Ringing Rocks.

"The boulders are made of a substance called diabase which is basically volcanic basalt. This is one of the largest diabase boulder fields in the Eastern United States. The boulders have a high content of iron and aluminum and were thought to have broken apart during the Pleistocene Epoch probably about 12,000 years ago. The boulders were created through many years of freeze-thaw cycles that broke up the diabase into individual pieces, a process known as "frost wedging". The rocks may then have accumulated in this one area as the water saturated soil provided lubrication for the stones to "creep" downhill to their present location, a process known as "solifluction". This could have happened during the prior ace ages when overlying most soil literally slid over the frozen permafrost below, carrying the boulders with it."