Kingdom of Matthias: The Age of Reform--Utopian Communities--SHAKERS
AMS 355 Group 13 project June Dung My Lien
THE SHAKER COMMUNITY
Shakers: name applied to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, a sect first heard of about 1750 in Great Britain.
Significance: Next to the Mormons, one of America’s most successful and enduring communal groups (Kyle 75).
Shakers set an example with inventive, orderly methods of building, toolmaking, and furniture making, animal husbandry, cooking, and production of woodenware, yarns, textiles, and botanicals herbs. In 1784 they innovated the practice of retailing garden seeds in small, labeled paper packets, developed the Poland China hog by crossing backwoods hogs with white Big China hogs to produce the breed that will be the backbone of the U.S. pork industry for generations .
Both Robert Owen (New Harmony) and John Humphrey Noyes (Oneida Community) knew of the Shaker’s success. Owen was encouraged by their success to put his own theories into practice with his commune New Harmony. Noyes claimed that communitarians were more indebted to the Shakers than to "any or all other social architects of modern times" (Hayden 65-6).
Something cool: In 1824 the Shakers build the first round barn (Refer to the picture…) at their Hancock, N.Y., community. It has a silo at its center with stalls and stanchions radiating outward to save steps in feeding the livestock. In years to come the round barn will be widely adopted by Midwestern dairy farmers.
Founder English religious mystic Ann Lee, 38, settles on a tract of land northeast of Albany in the New York colony and introduces "Shakerism" into America. A member of the Shaking Quaker sect, Lee abandoned her Manchester blacksmith husband after losing four children in quick succession. Becoming convinced through visions that Christ's second coming had been fulfilled in her, she assumed leadership of the Shakers, who called her Mother Ann or Ann the Word. She claimed to possess the gift of tongues and the ability to work miracles. Ann Lee is given to hysterics, convulsions, and hallucinations, denounces sex as a "filthy gratification," calls a consummated marriage "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," preaches celibacy, and establishes a following (Encarta).
Colonization: In 1774 Ann Lee, of Manchester, England, introduced the sect in the United States. Shakerism flourished and numerous Shaker communities were established. These communities held property in common, practiced asceticism, and honored celibacy above marriage.
Between 1780 and 1826 the Shakers founded 25 settlements from Main to the Ohio frontier.
Purpose: Gradual redemption of the world, aimed at nothing less than transforming the earth into heaven. The Shakers concentrated on the design and building process of architecture as a means of creating heaven on earth (Hayden 66).
Colonists: Members found environmental design the only activity broad enough in scope to accommodate their aspiration to turn the earth into heaven.
The first leaders were James Wardley, a tailor, and his wife, Jane, seceders from the Society of Friends. Jane claimed to have "received a call" to go forth and testify for the truth. From the peculiar trembling of the secessionists at their meetings came the name Shaking Quakers or
Shakers.
Reason for Demise: The movement diminished after 1860. No new members were accepted after 1964.
Please note that all dates vary depending on the text.
