Who’s on the Mount Rushmore of Bucks County history?

Mary Anne and I recently enjoyed the classic movie “North by Northwest” and climactic scenes atop colossal stone faces of four presidents on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. It got me to wondering: What would Mount Rushmore of Bucks County History look like?  Whose visage would you put up there?

I popped the question to Mary Anne who grew up in Bucks. Off the top, she offered William Penn and George Washington. After a brief pause, she added two others -- Pearl S. Buck and Margaret Mead. “There you go. Penn, Washington, Buck and Mead known around the world. You can tell everyone it’s my list, so it must be perfect,” she deadpanned.

Let’s take a look, hon, at your Mighty Four:

William Penn . He was Pennsylvania’s birth daddy who lived at Pennsbury Manor in Falls where he planned out the colony and its revolutionary self-government. Penn makes sense but it might be difficult carving his broad-brimmed Quaker hat into the granite summit.

George Washington . He’s not only the father of our country but slept around in Bucks during the American Revolution. He was tucked in at homes in Morrisville, Upper Makefield, Newtown, Warrington and Doylestown to name a few. Just about every school kid in America knows General George crossed the Delaware River from Bucks in a Christmas blizzard in 1776 to take Trenton and save the revolution.

Pearl S. Buck of Hilltown won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature for her novel “The Good Earth”. She was an advocate for children in addition to founding an orphanage at her home near Dublin village.

Margaret Mead of Doylestown was an anthropologist who concluded human behavior is determined by culture more than biology. Her book “Coming of Age in Samoa” had a profound influence on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Good list, Sweetie. But how would it fare against those of local historians I’ve come to know and respect? Here are their choices:

• Sally Sondesky of the Bensalem Historical Society recommends Pearl Buck , Saint Katharine Drexel of Andalusia (founded missionary order of Catholic nuns dedicated to the welfare of American Indians and African Americans) , Doylestown archeologist Henry Chapman Mercer (built the borough’s Mercer Museum and Fonthill Castle) and Morrisville banker Robert Morris (financed the American Revolution).

• Clarence King of Richboro who specializes in Lower Bucks history favors William Penn , Phineas Pemberton (Penn’s chief administrator of Bucks County beginning in 1687), Samuel Carpenter (his wealth led to Bristol Borough becoming the county’s industrial powerhouse from 1714 to the 1950s) and J.H. Battle (for his 1,176-page “History of Bucks County” published in 1887).

• David Oleksa of the Durham Historical Society would like to see the carved faces of William Penn , Henry Mercer, Durham’s George Taylor (signed the Declaration of Independence and provided George Washington’s army with ammunition from the Durham blast furnace) and B. F. Fackenthall Jr. (Durham Ironworks chemist and prolific historian for the Bucks County Historical Society).

• Douglas Miller, site director at Pennsbury Manor, envisions his Big Four as William Penn , Pearl Buck , a symbolic Lenape Indian and Newtown’s Edward Hicks (painted the iconic “Peaceable Kingdom” series of the 19 ^th century).

• Larry Langhans of the Historic Langhorne Association passes along the group’s choices : Pearl Buck, William Penn, Henry Mercer and a tie between W.W. H. Davis ( Doylestown author, Civil War hero and founder of the county historical society ), William Levitt (built Levittown)and Lenape Indian Chief Tamanend (once known as the “patron saint of America”).

The thin consensus is William Penn, Pearl S. Buck, Henry Mercer and Chief Tamanend.

Footnote: The closest we came to having anything like Mount Rushmore was Henry Mercer’s plan in 1911 to construct a gigantic stone turtle over Chief Tamanend’s presumed grave on a New Britain Township hill. The memorial would have been the size of a football field and symbolize the chief’s Lenape Indian tribe. In his lifetime, Tamanend publicly rebuked New York’s Iroquois Indians for their hostility to English settlers. The chief’s courageous stand made him a hero for 100 years in Colonial America. Though Mercer purchased land for the monument, controversy over where the chief was buried foiled his plan. What a shame.

Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Who’s on the Mount Rushmore of Bucks County history?