The Good Shepherd Fireplace: Lancaster’s One-of-a-Kind Mercer Masterpiece

In the lower level of Lancaster Theological Seminary’s Richards Hall, a now rarely used fireplace holds a secret. Created by an eccentric American archaeologist, it contains a map of ancient faith.

The sunken room itself already feels far removed from modern campus life, even one that’s a seminary. Oak benches line the walls. Dark wood paneling wraps the space in quiet warmth. The fireplace sits at the center of an inglenook, framed by bright handmade ceramic panels and set above a tiled floor. It is the kind of place that seems designed for silent contemplation or reading ancient tomes. What most visitors might not know is that the hearth before them carried religious images from nearly two thousand years ago.

At first glance, the fireplace is simply beautiful. Blues, greens, golds, oranges, and reds ripple across the tiles. A shepherd stands in the center, a lamb draped across his shoulders. Around him are boats, whales, baskets, birds, lions, arks, tombs, and human figures frozen in gestures of prayer, warning, rescue, and wonder.

Look longer, and the fireplace begins to behave less like decoration and more like a coded wall.

This is the Good Shepherd Fireplace, created in 1917 by Henry Chapman Mercer for Lancaster Theological Seminary. Mercer was already famous for reviving old-world tile-making methods at his Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown. Here, however, he made something unlike anything else. The tiles were not simply inspired by Bible stories. They were based on some of Christianity’s earliest surviving images, paintings found deep within Roman catacombs.

Richards Hall belonged to a seminary with its own long and winding history. Lancaster Theological Seminary was founded in 1825 by members of the German Reformed Church to train clergy and church leaders. It began in Carlisle with one professor and five students, moved to York, then to Mercersburg, and eventually to Lancaster. In 1871, the Seminary came to the campus of Franklin and Marshall College. By the 1890s, it had taken root on its own Lancaster site across the street along College Avenue.

Lancaster Theological Seminary’s Richards Hall.

The campus grew again during the years of the First World War. Between 1916 and 1917, the Seminary added a new dormitory, Richards Hall, and a new refectory, Dietz Hall, which served as the campus dining hall. The buildings reflected a medieval and Tudor Gothic spirit, full of heavy timber, carved detail, stained glass, and handcrafted decoration. They were not merely practical spaces. They were statements about memory, faith, learning, and tradition.

Richards Hall was built as a dormitory, but its lower level included more than student rooms. It held a gymnasium, handball courts, lockers, showers, and a lounge. That lounge became the setting for Mercer’s Good Shepherd Fireplace.

The key figure behind the fireplace was not Mercer alone. Dr. John C. Bowman, then president of the Seminary, had traveled through Roman catacombs used by early Christians. Their walls held some of the oldest surviving Christian art in the world. These images did not look like later church paintings. They were simpler, stranger, and more symbolic, filled with shepherds, fish, vines, ships, banquets, prophets, and scenes of deliverance.

Bowman brought photographs of those frescoes back to Lancaster, where Mercer transformed them into clay. Mercer’s creations are more translation than copy. He reimagined the ancient paintings made on plaster walls beneath Rome into raised, glazed, hand-formed tiles in Pennsylvania.

Mercer was the ideal craftsman for such a task. Born in Doylestown in 1856, he was an archaeologist, historian, collector, designer, and tile maker. He studied the material culture of the past not as something dead, but as something that could be revived through handwork. He collected tools, studied old clay processes, and rejected the cold perfection of industrial manufacturing.

His company name, Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, often causes confusion. Mercer was not Moravian, and the name did not mean he was connected to the Moravian Church. He chose it to honor the Moravian craftsmen who had settled in Pennsylvania during the 1700s. He admired their handcraft traditions, especially the decorated stove plates and tiles connected to Pennsylvania German culture.

Mercer’s tiles often feel ancient even when they are not. Their surfaces are uneven. Their colors pool and deepen. Their figures are sometimes awkward, sometimes elegant, often alive in a way machine-made decoration rarely is. The roughness and irregularity of the tiles help the fireplace feel like something excavated rather than installed.

At the center, within the largest panel, stands the Good Shepherd (tile 6).

Modern viewers might expect Christ to appear with a beard, robe, and halo. Mercer’s central figure is different. He appears as a young shepherd, almost classical in form, standing beneath trees with sheep around him and a lamb carried across his shoulders. This image comes from an older visual world, when early Christians often represented Christ through symbols rather than formal portraits. The Good Shepherd was one of the most beloved of those symbols. He was the rescuer, the protector, the one who carried the lost sheep home.

In the Catacomb of Callixtus in Rome, a Good Shepherd fresco dating to around 250 A.D. shows a youthful figure with a sheep on his shoulders. Mercer’s fireplace expands that ancient image into the dominant scene of the hearth. The shepherd is no longer a small fresco enclosed in a circular field. He becomes the calm center of a bright ceramic landscape.

Around him, the other tiles deepen the theme.

Jonah dominates the top row of tiles. In the center scene, he is cast toward the whale (tile 2). On the left, he emerges from the creature’s mouth (tile 1). The whale itself looks less like a natural animal than a sea monster from a dream, complete with claws and a curling body. On the right, Jonah rests beneath the gourd vine, reclining in a posture that feels strangely peaceful after the terror of the sea (tile 4).

For early Christians, Jonah was more than a prophet’s adventure story. His time inside the whale was read as an image of death and return, burial and resurrection. On Mercer’s fireplace, Jonah’s story stretches across the top like a strange border of danger and deliverance.

Samson carrying away the Gates of Gaza (tile 5). Daniel appears in the lions’ den (tile 7). Noah appears with the ark (tiles 10). Moses strikes the rock, and water pours out (tile 11). Lazarus rises from the tomb (tile 8). Each scene carries the same emotional weight. The trapped are freed. The thirsty are given water. The dead are called out. The endangered are preserved. The fireplace is not randomly decorated. It is a wall of rescue stories.

Directly below the Good Shepherd is a long banquet scene based on an early Christian image known as the Agape Meal (tile 9). The word agape refers to spiritual love, and the scene recalls the Last Supper without depicting it in the later, familiar form of Jesus seated with the twelve apostles. Figures sit around a table while baskets of bread line the foreground. Nearby, Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes (tile 12). These images shift the fireplace from rescue to provision. The same wall that shows deliverance from death also shows food, water, fellowship, and communion.

That combination would have been especially fitting in a Seminary social room. Students gathered there around a hearth decorated with images of gathering, feeding, teaching, and saving. The room itself became part of the symbolism. A fireplace gives warmth. A table gives food. A community gives companionship. Mercer’s tiles turned those ordinary needs into sacred images.

Not every tile comes from the Bible. There’s the 4th-century story of Saint Martin (tile 13). While serving as a Roman soldier in Gaul, a young Martin encountered a shivering, half-naked beggar at the city gates of Amiens. Having already given away everything else he owned, he drew his sword and cut his military cloak in half, wrapping the beggar in one piece and keeping the other.

Five tiles, repeated around the outside edges of the fireplace, feature popular “fraktur motifs” of stylized birds perched on baskets (tiles 3). These decorative elements connect the catacomb world to Pennsylvania’s own folk-art traditions. Mercer was not simply copying Rome. He was allowing ancient Christian images and Pennsylvania German design to meet in clay.

The result is vivid but not polished in the modern sense. Some figures seem stiff. Some animals look more symbolic than realistic. The whale is wonderfully bizarre. The lions feel almost heraldic. The baskets repeat like a pattern. The Good Shepherd himself stands with a quiet stillness that anchors the entire composition.

That handmade quality is part of the fireplace’s power. It does not look mass-produced. It looks touched, pressed, shaped, fired, and glazed by human hands.

Mercer often created variations of his tile designs and reused them in different buildings. Other biblical tiles appeared at the Seminary’s nearby Dietz Refectory, at St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster, and elsewhere. But the Good Shepherd Fireplace in Richards Hall was different. A 1926 Lancaster New Era newspaper article described it as having “no duplicate anywhere in the world.” That was not simply promotional language. After Mercer handcrafted these tiles, the molds were destroyed, making the fireplace literally irreplaceable.

That irreplaceable quality gives the quiet room a different kind of gravity. The fireplace is not just a surviving Mercer installation or a handsome piece of Seminary architecture. It is a single handmade object where Roman catacomb art, Pennsylvania craft, and student life meet around a single hearth. To understand it, you have to read it tile by tile.

Reading the Tiles

1. Jonah Emerging from the Whale: Jonah is delivered from the great fish, a story early Christians associated with death and resurrection.
2. Jonah Cast Toward the Whale: Jonah’s ordeal begins as he is thrown into the sea and swallowed.
3. Stylized Fraktur Motif: Repeated birds and baskets connect ancient Christian imagery with Pennsylvania German folk art.
4. Jonah and the Vine: Jonah rests beneath a sheltering plant, part of a biblical lesson about anger, mercy, and compassion.
5. Samson and the Gates of Gaza: Samson escapes his enemies by carrying away the city gates.
6. The Good Shepherd: Christ appears as a youthful shepherd carrying a lamb, one of early Christianity’s oldest symbolic images.
7. Daniel in the Lions’ Den: Daniel survives among the lions after being condemned for his faith.
8. Raising of Lazarus: Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb.
9. Agape Meal: An early Christian banquet scene recalling the Last Supper. Figures gather around a table with baskets of bread, suggesting spiritual love, fellowship, provision, and communion.
10. Noah and the Ark: Noah receives the dove with the olive branch, a sign of renewal after the flood.
11. Moses and Water from the Rock: Moses strikes the rock and water flows for the thirsty Israelites.
12. Jesus Multiplying Loaves and Fishes: Christ feeds a hungry crowd with a small amount of bread and fish.
13. Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak: Martin shares his cloak with a beggar, symbolizing Christian charity.

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Resources

• The Semi-Weekly New Era Sat, Oct 20, 1917 ·Page 7
• Lancaster New Era Sat, Sep 26, 1925 ·Page 11
• Lancaster New Era Sat, Jan 23, 1926 ·Page 15
• Curb Appeal: Pieces of WWI’s devastation embedded in Lancaster Theological Seminary architecture
• The Good Shepherd Fireplace by Henry Mercer
• Art in the Christian Tradition
• Agape feast 04
• The Station Churches of the Ember Days of Lent
• Good Shepherd (Callisto catacomb)
• The catacombs of Saint Callixtus