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Henry Mercer with one of his dogs.
Henry Mercer and His Dogs
■J enry Mercer adored dogs. He took them on his * lengthy travels abroad, referred lovingly to them in his diaries and notebooks, and tried to keep track of their pedigrees by means of “family trees” interleaved among his more serious writings.
Rollo was the fortunate “dog of record,” who left his paw prints in the fresh cement of the stairways of Fonthill, the Tile Works, and the Mercer Museum. But if the timing had been different, the prints could as easily have belonged to another of the many dogs Mercer owned during his lifetime, such as Janet or Jack, Sailor or Boatswain, Randso, Rory, Lady or Captain. (Janet and Rory actually died while Fonthill was under construction; both were buried at the south-eastern comer of the estate. Rollo’s son Jack succeeded him as dog-in-residence at Fonthill; Jack’s grave-site is unknown.)
Mercer preferred dogs with some Chesapeake Bay Retriever blood. This may have been partly because of the history of this breed, as described in an article of
1889 vintage, which he pasted into one of his scrapbooks. The Chesapeake Bay breed descends, according to the article, from two puppies, male and female, which were taken from an English brig which sank off the coast of Maryland in 1807.
The dogs and seamen from the sinking ship were rescued by a ship from Baltimore, whose crew paid the English captain a guinea apiece for the puppies. The male puppy, called Sailor, was given to John Francis Mercer, Henry Mercer’s great-grandfather. This illustrious ancestor, originally from Virginia, lived at the time of the gift near Annapolis, where he had served as governor of Maryland and member of the state legislature in the years just before the rescue.
The writer of the article conjectures that the salvaged dogs were of the Labrador breed, both on the basis of their descriptions, and due to the fact that the distressed ship was enroute between Labrador and England. In the years following however, they were indiscriminately interbred with other retrievers until around 1877, when serious attempts began to standardize the breed.
Intrigued, perhaps, by the story of the early history of these dogs, with its link to his family, Henry Mercer acquired several puppies from the best-known breeders of Chesapeake dogs, who furnished him with extensive pedigrees. At least two of his dogs were called “Sailor,” after the original sire. Fittingly, he took one of the Sailors along in 1889, when he explored the rivers of France on a houseboat, but unfortunately the dog died en route. (Two years earlier, his canine companion on a similar trip down the Danube River had been a European dog of unknown breed named Dachs'l, stolen by the gypsies along the way.)
His beloved Chesapeake Bay dog Rollo sired at least two other Mercer dogs, Captain and Jack, and inspired the following entry in a Mercer notebook:
April 30th [1916] Sunday about 1 pm ...
Dear old ROLLO died under the cherry tree of Fonthill. Of the fine big trees this one stands in the triangle between the loop (towards the Garage) of the main front driveway, and the road to the pottery — that is on the left of the straight road out to the front gate ....
He had been suffering with a wasting distemper for about two months. Thank heaven that it was permitted me to poorly appreciate his intense & boundless love for me — & that I petted him more as his beauty faded & his strength failed in paralysis & his loving eyes lost their sight & that we lifted him into the back for daily trips to the historical society, & that I never failed to answer when he called & often brought back the old smile upon the devoted face. May his footsteps outlast many generations of men on his stairways at Fonthill and at the Bucks County Historical Society...
Rollo’s remains were buried under the wistaria vine which clung to the southern face of the pottery building.
HENRY CHAPMAN MERCER: AN ANNOTATED CHRONOLOGY