Explore our region’s heritage of creating useful and beautiful functional items. Frakturs, quilts, coverlets, clocks, and much more make up the arts and crafts we surround ourselves with. Explore these partners:
Berks History Center
The Pennsylvania German Room and the Model Room featuring clocks and furniture from the estate of John J. Snyder, Jr. The Trades to Industry Room has also been completely renovated with new displays focused on agriculture, food, textiles, and iron. Highlights of the new Pennsylvania German gallery include two Berks County painted chests, one with a horse-and-rider design dated 1787 and the other an Embroidery Artist chest made for Dietrich Gackley of Lower Heidelberg Township in 1798. Two paintings by noted Berks County Almshouse artist Charles Hofmann are included along with a saffron box by Joseph Lehn, a striking painted “Bucher” box made for Nicholas Keim of Berks County, a Peter Derr fat lamp, and a painted corner cupboard filled with spatterware. There is also a stunning lineup of tall clocks with elaborately inlaid or carved cases.
Emmaus Historical Society
The Emmaus Historical Society artifact inventory consists of thousands of items: from buttons and bows to a dowry chest and a desk, as well as a cast iron stove and a hitching post! Photographs and correspondence, books and programs highlight the lives and times of Emaus/Emmaus.
Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites
The Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts is the only museum in Pennsylvania exclusively dedicated to the decorative arts. The museum houses the decorative arts collection of Annie Kemerer, the dollhouse collection of Elizabeth Johnston Prime, and the Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites collections management center.
Lehigh County Historical Society / Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum
The Lehigh County Historical Society is one of the largest historical societies in America. The 30,000 square foot headquarters museum, the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum, is a state-of-the-art climate-controlled facility that houses one of the finest historical research libraries in the state of Pennsylvania. The Heritage Museum includes 6 galleries with more than 13,000 square feet of exhibits.
Monroe County Historical Association
The Stroud Mansion was built in 1795 by Col. Jacob Stroud. The building serves as the headquarters of the Monroe County Historical Association and houses a local history museum and research library. The museum has four floors of exhibit space and features the Stroud room, Victorian parlor, colonial kitchen, military and medical display, children’s toy room, and a Pennsylvania German bedroom. A variety of artwork is on display throughout the museum.
Moravian Historical Society
Explore 18th century decorative arts in the Moravian Historical Society’s Whitefield House Museum. The collection includes beautiful examples of case clocks, textiles, furnishings, needle work, and oil paintings by some of America’s earliest artists.
Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society
The Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society’s Mixsell Illick House showcases the Society’s large collection of decorative arts spanning the colonial era through 1960s. Exquisite ceramics, fine textiles, furniture, and much more are lovingly preserved and exhibited at the site. Special Northampton County regional pieces such as coverlets, redware, quilts, frakturs, samplers, metal work, case clocks, and paintings are also featured on permanent exhibition at the Society’s Sigal Museum.
Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center
See how people furnished their homes for over 200 hundred years, starting in the 1730s at the Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center. In addition, enjoy 20 paintings by Walter Emerson Baum, a Pennsylvania Impressionist, and the world’s largest collection of fraktur, or illuminated manuscripts.
Tatamy Historical Society
Guests to the Tatamy Historical Society will enjoy an exciting look at the history of the Borough of Tatamy through photography, textiles, decorative arts, and other objects. Genealogists and historians should not miss the collection of scrapbooks, records, newspaper articles, and more in the archives.
The TileWorks of Bucks County
Between 1911 and 1912, Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) built the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works to produce a range of wares, including unique tiles that were praised by critics and sought after by architects. The honest, hand-made quality of his work fully expressed the ideals of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, elevating Mercer to one of the movement’s most important proponents. His tiles were emblematic of the survival, or rebirth, of the handcraft tradition. By the turn of the century, he was recognized as a premier maker of “artistic” tiles, and his pioneering influence still affects many tilemakers today.
