Doylestown, PA

Tales of James Michener: Doylestown remembers its native sons

It’s all there—the file cabinets, typewriter, manuscripts, and desk of James A. Michener—preserved by the town that takes so much pride in remembering its native sons.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose novels led readers around the world grew up in Doylestown, Pa., a quiet town of 8,400. Orphaned at birth in 1907, he was raised by Mabel Michener and became a high school basketball star, editor of the school newspaper, and senior class president. Michener mowed Doylestown Hospital’s lawns for spending money. Later, when his writing took him all over the globe, he always returned to Doylestown, eventually building a home here.

And the town built him a museum. When the century-old county jail on the edge of the downtown closed in the mid-1980s, the Bucks County Arts Council saw a prime spot for a museum to be named for Doylestown’s most famous son. A council member, and Michener’s longtime friend, Herman Silverman, phoned him to ask permission.

“He lived everywhere he wrote a book about and was then in Colorado,” Silverman recalls. “He answered my question with, ‘Will it cost me anything?’ I said no.”

But that changed. Bucks County allocated $600,000 toward the museum. Then, at its 1988 opening, an impressed Michener asked how he could help. Silverman said, “You can give us $1 million, Jim.” The author obliged, and then didn’t speak to his friend for months.

Eventually, however, Michener and his wife donated $9 million to the museum, including $2 million toward the Mari Sabusawa Michener Wing, named for her. The museum’s permanent multi-media exhibit has celebrated Bucks County’s rich artistic heritage since 1996.

“I fight to keep my name off buildings,” Michener once said, but he was generous to his hometown. Shortly before he died in 1997, he wrote a gracious foreword for a book about Doylestown Hospital and gave a $7 million challenge grant to the town’s cultural district, which includes The Mercer Museum, opposite the Michener.

This dramatic, seven-story National Historic Landmark, renowned for its colonial American folk art, furnishings, and tools, is named for Henry Chapman Mercer, another of Doylestown’s famous sons. Harvard graduate, historian, archaeologist, and ceramist, Mercer also designed nearby Fonthill, a 44-room castle where his tiles and artwork are displayed. A leader of America’s arts & crafts movement in the early 20th century, Mercer’s former studio and factory, the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, is a museum as well.

Doylestown, named for William Doyle, who obtained the first tavern license at the village crossroads in 1745, recently has been revitalizing its downtown through construction of a new courthouse, hanging flower baskets from old-fashioned lampposts, adding brick walkways, and urging retailers to make storefronts colonial.

Revitalization climaxed with the simultaneous expansion of the Michener and renovation of the County Theater. Lovingly restored by volunteers, the 1938 art deco theater, now run by a nonprofit corporation, raised funds to buy the building in 1996. Today, members line up for first-run art films, creating evening crowds downtown.

Two blocks south, the Michener Museum averages 90,000 visitors a year. Linda Milanesi, its director of marketing, is proud that cultural tourism, including films and exhibits, “brings visitors and makes the town lively. Our wonderfully cooperative cultural community makes this such a successful place,” Milanesi says.

In all, Michener gave away $117 million, mainly to museums, libraries, and universities—having made his money in the arts, he felt he should return it to them.

To Bruce Katsiff, director of the Michener Museum, “Jim had a richness of character and integrity, a generosity of spirit that far exceeded any material wealth he amassed. His philanthropy touched people around the world and helped build a thriving cultural district here.”

Carol Milano writes from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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