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V2Thursday, June 3,2010I I.mcock Shaklt;Twww.berkshireeagle.comThe early yearsBy Charles BonentiBerkshire Eagle Stafflliey were the “Moonies” of their day.Just as followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church considers him a modern messiah, are mocked with that label in our time, so were members of the 18th-century United Society of Believers, condemned by mainstream church-goers for thinking their leader, Ann Lee, channeled the spirit of God.That belief, plus their communal lifestyle, vows of celibacy and ecstatic group-dance worship services, earned them the epithet “Shaking Quakers.”Yet the Shakers would survive and even prosper for two centuries, including in Hancock, where the Shaker community started in 1790 and ended in 1959. The following year, Hancock Shaker Village became a living museum to the Shakers’ way of life. This year, the village is celebrating its 50th anniversary.The sect’s roots date to 1736, when Ann Lee was born in Manchester, England, as one of 10 children of a poor blacksmith. Forced to work as a child to help support the family, and then to marry against her wishes, she suffered four miscarriages and then lost her four living children to infant diseases.“The recurring tragedies of her early life led her to believe that marriage only served men’s carnal appetites, and helped develop her later dogma of celibacy,” Robert F. W. Meader, former director of the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, N.Y., said in his 1984 essay for the book “Hancock Shaker Village/Hie City of Peace: An Effort to Restore a Vision 1960-1985.”Lee attached that dogma to the creed of the Quaker religious sect, which she had joined as a young woman.'Hie Quakers, who began in the mid-1600s, believe that people can experience the spirit of God directly, without traditional church clergy and ritual. And they live lives of sim-Shakers realizedtobacco risks1841By Derek GentileBerkshire Eagle StaffHANCOCK - Over the years, awareness of the harmful effects of smoking has become widespread throughout the country. Many public - and some private - buildings have banned smoking completely, generating the sight of the harried cigarette user sneaking a puff or two on the sidewalk.But banning tobacco products isn’t a new concept The Shakers realized about 170 years ago that the consumption of tobacco was unhealthy. The fine sensibilities of our nature sicken at the thought that our clean, consecrated dwellings should ever again be polluted with the fumes or saliva of the tobacco user,” a Shaker wrote from the community of Union Village, Ohio, in 1841.By that year, the temperance wave of the 1820s had swept through Shaker villages, as it had through most of the country. Before that, the Shakers weren't necessarily opposed to tobacco.The Shaker communities in Watervliet and New Lebanon, N.Y., made and sold pipes and pipe stems of red and white clay found in the area. In addition, according to a 1955 thesis by Shaker scholar Gerald F. Ham, tobacco was planted by the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill, Ky„ for most of the 19th centuTy.But a bylaw banning tobacco was introduced by the Shakers in * 1841. According to Eagle files, an 1873 article in The Shaker and Shakeress” listed Twelve Reasons Why No Rational Being Should Use Tobacco.”The main reason, according to the story, was that the habit *is essentially filthy”plicity, pacifism and social activism.The Shakers held most of those same beliefs, but went further in advocating celibacy and in thinkingBen Garver/ Berkshire Eagle StaffHistorical re-enactors Caroline Correia and L^ee Wheat spin yam at Hancock Shaker Village, just as the Shakers did in the past.their founder was the female counterpart of Jesus Christ.Persecuted for their anti-church position and their disruptive style of worship, Lee and her followers left England in 1774 for America, where Meader said a “vision” had told her they would find a more tolerant environment.Landing in New York, they migrated north to Albany and settled in Watervliet, where in 1781 Lee had another vision or “gift,” as she called it, to begin missionary work in New England.She and her brother,William, both of whom died in 1784, helped launch what would become 12 communities in the Northeast: four in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, two Maine, two in New Hampshire and three in New York.Others came later in the Midwest.At its peak in 1849, Meader wrote,the order had between 6,000 and 10,000 members, mostly convertsShakers, according to Steven Paterwic, a Shaker scholar and overseer of Hancock Shaker Village. (Mount Lebanon now is the campus of the Darrow School in New Lebanon, N.Y.)Because the number of Berkshire families that wanted to join the Shakers was too plentiful for theinfrom other faiths.They formed communities governed by elders and eldresses and a hierarchy of regional councils.One of these communities — Mount Lebanon, established in 1787 became the center union for all1. Watervliet, N.Y., 1787-19382. Mount Lebanon, N.Y., 1787-19473. Hancock, Mass., 1790-19594. Harvard, Mass., 1791 19195. Enfield, Conn., 1792 19176. Tyringham, Mass., 1792-18757. Canterbury, N.H., 1792-19928. Shirley, Mass., 1793-19099. Enfield, N.H., 1793-191810. Alfred, Maine, 1793-193111. Sabbathday Lake, Maine, 1793-(active)12. West Union (Busro), Ind., 1810-182713. South Union, Ky., 1811-192214. Union Village, Ohio, 1812-191015. Watervliet, Ohio, 1813-190016. Pleasant Hill, Ky., 1814 191017. Whitewater, Ohio, 1824 190718. North Union, Ohio, 1826-188919. Groveland, N.Y., 1836-1892Mount Lebanon community to absorb, Hancock was established as a separate society in 1790, with satellites in Tyringham and in Enfield, Conn., Paterwic said.In those early years there was astrict separation of men and women.“They did not generally ever work together and were never alone with one another,” Paterwic said, adding that women did kitchen and dining room work and men handled outdoor chores. “There was no talking at meals and no sitting together at meals or at worship. Even their dances followed patterns in which men and women seemed to mix but didn’t.” Children came into the community as their parents joined, or were taken in as orphans or indentured apprentices, and were raised in the faith as they learned a trade.The Shakers’ inventiveness, craftsmanship and cooperative management made them prosperous in the pre-Civil War agrarian economy, but rapid industrialization after the war doomed their way of life, according to Meader and Paterwic.Their major industries — furniture-making and herbal pharmaceuticals — could not compete with cheaper, mass-produced goods, and manufacturing offered moneymaking opportunities that lured enterprising young people away. Celibacy discouraged new converts, and the numbers of children willing to stay and carry on the faith declined as child adoptions got more expensive andlegally complicated, Paterwic said.“I think the taking in of children without their parents was the greatest mistake the Shakers ever made and the one that led to their decline,” he said.As the communities shrank, those who stayed behind were forced to hire outside laborers and managers, people who did not share traditional Shaker values.Community after community folded.In the Berkshires, Meader listedTyringham as the first to close, in 1875, followed by Mount Lebanon in 1947 and Hancock in 1959.Tbday, the only Shaker community left in the world is at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. It has a public museum and library, operated as a sep-nonprofit organization, according to Brother Arnold Hadd, one of the three inhabitants.The group still accepts converts willing to abide by the Shaker covenant.arate,
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The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, US
Thu, Jun 03, 2010
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