Music has always been an essential part of Shakers’ experience. Right from the beginning, music was an important part of Shaker worship. At first, the music was chanting and were transmitted by word of mouth. But, as some of the members experienced a ‘spiritual gift’, the hymns were written down.
Since most of them had no formal musical training, their hymns were not written in musical notation but in a form using letters. The Shakers felt that these hymns were inspired by God.
The Shakers’ first hymnal, Millennial Praises, contained 140 songs and was published in 1812.
Most people are familiar with the song, Simple Gifts. Simple Gifts was composed in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackett, on or about the time he moved to the Shaker community at Alfred, Maine, otherwise known as Sabbathday Lake. This community is the model for Zion, the community I include in my Will Rees mysteries.
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.
