Have you ever met a Shaker? Probably not unless you’ve been to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine where two Shakers still reside in the only active Shaker village remaining. The other nineteen villages that once dotted the eastern states and Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana have long passed into history. Fortunately for history buffs, many of those villages have been restored with museums that show how Shakers once lived and thrived in those places. These pictures are some I’ve taken at the two Shaker Villages that once were active in Kentucky and are both now museums and historical sites.
The Shakers were a religious group that called themselves the Society of Believers in the Second Coming of Christ. The founder of the group was Ann Lee, a woman born in England who brought a small group of eight followers to the new country of America in 1774. Those outside the society called the Society members Shakers because of how they were sometimes so overcome by spiritual emotion during their singing and dancing worship that they would tremble and shake.
The Shakers actually embraced this name originally coined in ridicule and used it on their seeds, elixirs and other products they sold to the “world” as the Shakers called those outside their villages. In fact, Shaker was probably the first trusted name brand in the United States.
The Shakers did have some beliefs that set them apart. They gathered their converts in villages they hoped would be like heavens on earth. They eschewed all manner of worldly trappings and sought peace and unity in all things. Because they intended their villages to be a heaven on earth, they were celibate because in the Bible (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:20) Jesus says those that rise from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. Therefore, they, wanting to bring heaven to earth in their villages, didn’t allow marriages.
In their large houses, the men lived on one side of the hallways and the women on the other. The Shaker leaders were so serious about keeping their rules of living as brothers and sisters that they had two staircases in every house. That was to keep even an incidental touch on the stairways from plummeting their converts into sin, as they might say. It does appear they did understand human nature.
The Shakers’ most familiar saying is “Hearts to God. Hands to work.” The Shakers believed that work was a way to worship, and so every able-bodied Shaker member or aspiring convert had to work with their hands. Another of their sayings, attributed to their Mother Ann, was “Labor to make the way of God your own; let it be your inheritance, your treasure, your occupation, your daily calling.”
This call to work even included their ministry leaders, two brethren and two sisters, who lived apart from the rest of the community in order to remain unbiased in regard to any disputes that might arise in the village. These leaders lived in the upper floor over their meetinghouse and had their own private workshop close by.
One of the Shaker sayings was “Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.” That was to encourage their members to work efficiently and at the same time, do the very best work they could. In the pursuit of this excellence and efficiency, the Shakers came up with many inventions in order to make their work easier and better. A Shaker sister is credited with inventing the circular saw when she observed the brothers using a crosscut saw and thought of how her spinning wheel worked. The Shakers were ahead of the times with the equality of the sexes. While work was divided along gender lines, women held leadership roles and were considered equals in the society. That was radical thinking for the 1800s.
The Shakers were known for their fine craftsmanship in regard to the furniture they built and the structures in their villages. At a time when ornate design was popular, the Shakers made everything simple. They had a worship song “Tis a Gift to Be Simple.” One of their reasons for making furniture without decorative additions was to make them easier to clean. They had peg boards around every wall so they could hang things up off the floors to make sweeping easier. Their chairs were hung upside down to keep dust off the seats. Their beds had wheels to be more easily moved for cleaning under them.
They not only crafted brooms and invented a machine to make the first flat brooms, they had worship songs where they acted out sweeping away sinful thoughts and actions while they sang. The Shakers staunchly believed in cleanliness as their Mother Ann told them “Good spirits will not live where there is dirt.” That went back to making their villages heavens on earth for dirt would not be in heaven.
At their peak in 1840, the Shakers had 6,000 members in their twenty villages. But times changed. After the Civil War, the Shaker products couldn’t compete with the similar things being made in the industrialized factories. Jobs were easier to find and people weren’t so ready to live by the Shaker rules. The main rules were communal property where a convert gave over ownership of any possessions to the Society, celibacy with all living as brothers and sisters, and confession. They also had many rules they hoped would contribute to the unity of their society such as wearing similar clothing and even rules on which knee should first touch the floor when they knelt to pray.
In my books, my characters find themselves at Shaker villages because of unexpected difficulties. They had to learn the Shaker Way and decide if they could walk that path. This was true for my main character in The Innocent, my Shaker book now on e-book sale at Amazon for 99 cents.
Did you enjoy the tour of a Shaker Village? Ever toured one of the Shaker historical sites in person?
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(Portions of this post first appeared in Historical Romance Magazine)
For all their oddities and rules, they were a peaceful people known for their generosity, hard work, and superior products. They built amazing buildings out of the material they had at hand. The Pleasant Hill Shaker Village Centre House was built in 1835 from stone quarried from the nearby river cliffs. Micajah Burnett came into the Pleasant Hill Village as a teenager and although untrained, became a gifted architect who designed many of their buildings. He also built these amazing stairways in their Trustee building that has survived through the years. It now holds a restaurant where you can order Shaker fare and see these twin staircases as they wind up through the air.
Those two things, the Centre House and those beautiful staircases have made an appearance in almost all my Shaker stories and they do again in my new Shaker release, The Refuge. The Shaker generosity to those in need is in evidence in this story set in 1850. The Shakers never turned away those in need and took in orphans and the destitute. Even if the needy person was simply passing through, the Shakers gave them food. This was difficult for them during the Civil War, when both the Union and Confederate armies would come through their villages in search of food. When I read about how the Shakers at Pleasant Hill set up trestle tables beside the road and kept them filled with food for the soldiers to grab as they marched through their village, I knew I had to put that in a book which I did in The Seeker. With The Refuge, the sight of the cradles in the Shaker museums made me wonder about babies in the village and started me down a new story road.
Thank you for joining me on this historical tour of the Shakers. If you are ever near any of the villages open to visitors, I hope you’ll take an actual walk on the same walkways that Shakers did many years ago.