Daniel Lewis is a man who wears many hats.

The Washington Township resident’s collection totals over 2,000 hats. That’s where he stopped counting anyway.

Each day for work, he wears a different hat. If he goes out on the weekend, he’ll wear another one. And if he travels away from home, the hats go along, too.

“We go on vacation, I take two per day, one in the morning, one at night,” he said. “I have a suitcase for it. I have a hat suitcase.”

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If you limit to Phillies caps alone, Lewis has more than 10. An avid hunter, he’s got more than a dozen camouflage hats.

Building a collection

The collection started more than 20 years ago. Then he started dating his wife, Kim. Contrary to what you might think, she loves his collection.

“I thought it was the coolest thing. Like, this is something about him that’s original,” she said.

His hat collection was only about 60 at the time they were married. Daniel’s reputation became known among family and friends and they started helping out with the collection. Any vacation he went on, he bought a hat.

A few friends have donated hat collections to him that number in the hundreds. Generally what happens is their wives get tired of the hats and want them out of the house.

“They said ‘They gotta go.’ I said ‘OK, I’ll add them to my couple thousand,’ ” he said.

It doesn’t appear that will ever happen with Daniel’s collection. Not only does Kim enjoy her husband’s hobby, she’s an active participant. She once had a volunteering gig at a used clothing store. During the store’s bag sales, she’d fill up with hats — as many as 25 at a time — for only $2.

“After a while instead of dealing with it, I was feeding the insanity,” she said.

“She wasn’t stopping it, I’ll put it that way,” Daniel said.

The hats live in Daniel’s garage, and they take up a lot of room. He’s got plastic totes upon plastic totes. When he moved to his current house, it took him eight trips just to move his hat collection.

The vast majority of Daniel’s hats are baseball caps. His ideal cap has a bent brim. Trucker hats and flat brims are not his style. He also has some antique hats and other eclectic choices, like an Amish hat he picked up at Shady Maple.

He works in construction, so it was natural to start collecting hard hats, too. His employer owns smaller companies all over the state, and he has baseball caps for each one of those as well.

Family affair

Daniel and Kim now have two children, D.J. and Larry. D.J., 15, has a few hats of his own, and shares Daniel’s love of the Eagles. He said his dream hat is an Eagles hat with crazy white and green hair.

Kim’s is an antique hat from the 1800s. Daniel’s is a real Keppie, the traditional hat of the Civil War.

For Kim, the love of hats may be in her blood. While tracking her family’s genealogy, she discovered that an ancestor on her mother’s side held a patent for a hat-making machine back in the 1800s.

“When we found that out, we were doing our family history, and we started laughing horrendously,” she said.

If he didn’t collect hats, Daniel would probably just collect Eagles’ gear. In preparation for the big game, he added another hat to his collection — a Super Bowl commemorative.

While he’s stopped counting the hats in his collection, Daniel says he’ll be collecting hats for many years to come.

“I don’t plan on stopping anytime,” he said.