Category Archives: Long Shadow of Murder

The Shakers and the Simple Life

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The three pillars of the Shaker belief were Church, Community and Celibacy.

Besides the Sunday services, the Shakers believed that work itself was sacred and a job well done was as much a prayer to God as a Church service. One of their mottos was “Put your handsto Work,  and your hearts to God.”

Essentially an agricultural community, the Shakers ran large and productive farms. (And where did they get the money for this property? Although they would accept converts who had nothing, wealthier converts were expected to donate their property (dowries, land, and money) to the community. This meant they quickly grew wealthy in their turn.

Most of the work was split along traditional gender lines. Their standards of
cleanliness (not at all common in that time) meant their livestock was fat and
healthy, their milk pure and disease free. Although most people have heard of
the Shaker furniture, they also ran many businesses to support themselves. Many
villages had their own mills, tanneries, basket making and broom making shops.
They were famous for their medicinal herbs and seeds, which they sold via traveling
wagons. They also engaged in a thriving international trade, especially with China. In today’s money, they made millions.

They were creative inventors as well and many of the villages had machinery far in advance of the neighboring farms. The Shakers invited the first clothes pin. And well before advances in modern chemistry, they invented a product to add to clothes to so they required less ironing.

 Their attempt to create perfection resulted in the high quality of their products that we admire today.

The Sisters, besides cooking, caring for the children, doing laundry and housework, spun and
wove cloth that was famous for its high quality. They had equal power to the men.
Every Family had two Elders and two Eldresses, two Deacons and two Deaconesses
to share the authority for the community. The Shakers believed that God was
both male and female and of equal importance.

Celibacy was strictly practiced. Marriages were not allowed and married couples that joined a Family were expected to live as brother and sister.  Men and Women were segregated although Unions, where the Brethren and the Sisters could meet and talk on a regular basis, became a feature of the village life.

Last week I wrote about their practice of taking in orphans. It became so well known, they found foundlings on their doorsteps. They also took in children whose parents signed them over to the Shakers as quasi-apprentices. The New York State Museum has examples of some of the contracts signed between the parents and the Shakers. When the children reached the age of twenty one, they were free to choose between remaining or leaving. Many of the children raised by the Shakers married out; the Shakers did not require the Children to ‘make a Shaker’.

Eventually, with the shift ofAmerica from a rural to an urban society the flood of new converts began to
diminish and by the 1930’s the number of members had declined so severely that several
villages were closed and much of the land sold off. Many of the once-thriving Shaker villages, for example, Hancock Village, became living museums. The only village still in existence today is Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

round barn in Hancock Village

The Shakers

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In two weeks, the newest of the Will Rees/Shaker series will be released. In The Long Shadow of Murder, a body is discovered in the woods near the Shaker community of Zion. Suspicion immediately falls on the Shakers, although Rees is skeptical. He feels there are plenty of other suspects, including the victim’s wife and other traveling companions. Indeed, the murder has its roots in the Revolutionary War.

The Shakers were, if not the most successful commune, was certainly one of them. An offshoot of the Quakers, the name Shakers comes from ‘the Shaking Quakers.” The group’s proper name was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing; with a name like that it is understandable they had a shorter and more easily remembered nickname.

The wellspring of the Shakers was a woman, Mother Ann Lee. She sailed to the colonies in the middle 1700s and set up a damsel community just outside of Albany, New York. (The runways for the airport are now located over the old fields.) Like the Quakers, they believed in simplicity and were abolitionists. Mother Ann Lee a former Quaker, was revered. Her position as the prophet/leader resulted in two important doctrines: men and women were equal – highly unusual in this day and age, and they were celibate. Despite that, for many years, they thrived.

How did they succeed for so long then? And they were. They took in converts. Here the unmarried woman could find a home, The disabled could find a home. The landless men, who frequently stopped at the Shaker villages for the winter, thus earning the title of Winter Shaker, had three meals a day and a roof over the heads. Although many left again come spring, some probably remained.

And they adopted orphans. Since this was a world with no safety net, and lots of death, there were a lot of orphans. Besides training these children in the skills they would need in an agrarian world – the girls learned cooking, sewing and other homemaking skills, and the boys farming – they were taught how to read and write. Since males and females were rigidly separated, the boys went in winter, the girls in summer. The Shakers thrived until the world changed. After 1900, the United States went from agrarian to industrial. Girls now could work in factories.

In 1966, the United States passed a law stating that the Shakers could no longer adopt orphans. That really impacted this group.

Yes, they still accept converts. The numbers have shrunk to 2, but one is a younger man who converted. These two live at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. This was the smallest and poorest of all the Shaker communities. My village of Zion is based on Sabbathday Lake.

Why did I choose to set murders within or near this group? Well, although most were peaceful good people, there are always some bad apples. Certainly the acceptance of anyone, and the toleration of the Winter Shakers, opened up the communities to some of these bad’uns.