Lexington, USA - Sister Frances, one of four remaining Shakers in America, told documentarian Ken Burns that she didn’t want to be remembered as a chair.
Her fears are well founded.
Consider, for a moment, the Shaker chair. Perfect in its construction. Free of adornment but aesthetically magnificent. Made as if God would be pleased. Made by people who cared only that God was pleased.
Now the chair really is what is left of the Shakers in the American consciousness. Which means the flesh-and-blood experience, the history and the lore of the Shakers, is missed or misunderstood. And the only things standing between Sister Frances and furniture posterity are the 19 historically reconstructed Shaker villages in the United States that strive to educate Americans about the Shaker heritage.
They have an uphill battle.
This weekend, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, near Harrodsburg, is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Shaker mission’s arrival in Kentucky. Today at the village, you can hear about the archaeology and the music, the rock fence-building, the lives and the trials and even the paint color choices of everyday Kentuckians who were engaged in an extraordinary religious experiment.
If you want, you also could learn a lot of cool stuff they don’t normally get to tell you. About the secret sacred site called Holy Sinai’s Plain, where God, George Washington and Tecumseh appeared to the Shakers. And about how they were ordered to destroy that and did. You’ll find out about Polly Hauser’s suicide, if you ask. About how, at 19, she fell in love but wasn’t allowed to leave the Shaker community and chose death instead of staying. About the time the Mother Church back East told these Kentucky Shakers to give up pork, and how they were willing to give up sex but drew the line at ham.
And you’ll witness the most successful communal experience (more than 200 years) in American history, one that has always, from its first days, needed tourism. And one that might find its furniture is not such a terrible legacy after all.
“From the Shakers’ viewpoint,” said Brian Bixby, a University of Massachusetts historian who specializes in Shaker village tourism, “the ideal location for one of their villages was to be far enough away from ‘the world’ to be a closed community, and yet close enough to transportation and cities to engage in trade.
“The sites that have survived have generally been out in the country a ways, but near a city, and often in a region or along a route connected to tourism. Pleasant Hill was on the route to Mammoth Cave.”
The tourist appeal from the beginning was the same as today — to see the really unusual among us and to shake our heads at their beliefs and wonder, a little, about their lives.
“Visitors even in the 1810s came to Shaker Sunday meetings, which were open to the public, to see the Shakers dance. Dancing in worship,” Bixby said. Imagine that “in a time when many people thought dancing sinful. Imagine over 100 men and women engaging in elaborate group dancing and singing, always careful to keep separate orders between the men and women. It’s the stuff of Broadway shows.”
Changing roles
In the 1830s, the Shakers were there to debate religion with visitors. A decade or so later, antebellum Americans still didn’t much care for the Shaker theology, but they’d come to admire Shaker industry. By the 1850s, the Shakers, no longer a growing sect, began to be treated sentimentally, as if the Shaker commune was an interesting old folks’ home.
When the turnpike road was being built in 1837, the Shakers asked that it be next to their land, ostensibly so their mills could be used but also so visitors could be welcomed, said Kim McBride, co-director of the Kentucky Archaeological Survey.
“The Shakers had to do business with the world to survive and prosper,” Bixby said. “But they didn’t want customers and salesmen wandering around the Shaker village. So they erected a building called the Office (or Trustees’ Office) to conduct business affairs and put up short-term visitors.
“People started buying goods from the Shakers when they visited their villages, so the Office gradually developed a store. By the 1880s, several Office buildings had been remodeled to include what can only be described as a gift shop.”
The height of visitation at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill was in 1990, with 161,000 paid visitors. This year, they expect half that number. (By comparison, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., will probably see more than 15 million visitors this year.)
The 19 remaining Shaker villages share their declining attendance with almost all outdoor historical sites in the United States. Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, the country’s premier historic site in terms of attendance, had 730,000 visitors last year, down from a peak of 950,000.
The aura of the chairs
Which brings us back to the iconic Shaker chair.
Shaker furniture was collected as early as the 1890s. Americans searching for religious faith have tended to see something in the design aesthetic that speaks deeply to the spiritual, Thomas Merton noted: “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that an angel might come and sit on it.”
It’s as if the chairs, or whatever they touched, are imbued with the aura the buyer wants to feel. And if not faith, they want virtue, and the objects seem to carry that burden as well.
Five years ago, a Shaker sewing cabinet sold for $222,500 at auction.
Archaeologist McBride, who has worked at the Shaker site for more than 15 years, said anthropologists and archaeologists are always looking at a culture’s handiwork as well as its detritus to draw analogies about the culture. In the case of the Shakers, the connection between the place and its beliefs is particularly relevant.
“They believed they were creating heaven on earth. The things we find in the ground are a direct extension of what they believe,” she said. “It’s the point of their existence, to constantly make the connection between work and worship.”
McBride cited the recent excavation of post molds, the hole you’d make in the ground to insert posts for fences. In the Shakers’ case, the holes are “the most labor-intensive work I have ever seen in 30 years of archeology, and for something that is below the ground and no one would see.”
Shaker scholar Bixby said that in 1900, visitors came to the villages to “see the America that used to be, the upstanding farmers and peaceful rural villages of yore.” A half-century later, Shakers were seen as exemplifying the American virtues of the past that had won us the last war and would win us the Cold one.
In the 21st century, the Shakers’ chairs are shorthand for all that we want them to be and for all they wanted to be.
Susan Lyons Hughes, director of education at Pleasant Hill, said she has so much to impart about the Shakers that she’d like to give everyone “a brain transplant” when they hit her front gate.
But, she said, “if all you take away from the visit here is a sense of peace or a sense of their striving for perfection, then you have learned something important about the Shakers, and I have no real complaint.”