Foxborough Historical Society,
Foxborough Mass, USA
The April 26, 2005, meeting of the Historical Society featured Michael French from Canterbury Shaker Village, New Hampshire, speaking on "The Shakers."
We have much to learn from the Shakers – notably that the "idealist" organizations we know from our own time such as hippies and flower children, or (closer to home) the Brook Farm movement, are not the only people who have searched for the "pure" and "good" life. The Shakers also show us that an organization – any organization, even our own Historical Society – needs to attract and keep good, dynamic members to survive and grow.
The Shakers are one of the few success stories resulting from the proliferation of utopian groups in eighteenth and nineteeenth century Europe and America. They splintered from a Quaker community in Manchester, England. James Wardley, its preacher, had absorbed the teachings of the millenial French prophets and his community began to evolve around 1746. The members were known as the Shaking Quakers and were viewed as radical for their communion with the spirits of the dead and impassioned shaking that would occur at their services. As radicals, the members were harrassed, including a young married woman named Ann Lee. Fervent from a young age, Ann had a revelation during a long imprisonment that she was the Second Coming of Christ.
The vision had a great impact on the congregation and "Mother" Ann became the official leader of the group in 1772. With a distinctly new version of the Second Coming and other beliefs contradictory to mainstream Christian thinking, it was at this juncture that the Shaking Quakers became known as the Shakers. These radical views increased the Shakers' persecution and a small group composed of her brother, niece, husband and five others followed Mother Ann's vision of a holy sanctuary in the New World to New York in 1774. They struggled for five years to survive, gaining few converts, on a communal farm in Watervliet, NY. During this period they faced great persecution for being both English and pacifistic in the middle of the Revolutionary War.
The turning point was a wave of religious revivalism called the New Light Stir that swept across New England between 1776 and 1783, bringing in new converts from other millenial groups and allowing the Shakers to safely proselytize.
In 1779 Joseph Meacham and his followers joined the Shakers, becoming their first converts. Most of this expansion happened under Joseph Meacham's leadership. Meacham organized the communities and made New Lebanon, NY the Parent Ministry from which came both spiritual and commercial leadership. These industries would become both the sustaining income for the Shakers and a form of recruiting and publicity as their simple, functional furniture designs, music and dancing, and self-published books became popular in secular culture. By the mid-1800's they reached their peak membership and peak popularity, becoming a sort of tourist attraction that outsiders (known as The World's People) could observe in their communities on Saturday evenings.
The Civil War ended the American fascination with the many utopian social experiments of the early nineteenth century. Industrialization made Shaker crafts obsolete and depleted even further the attraction of a way of life already made less tasteful by the emphasis on celibacy and severe simplicity. Between this decline in attraction and the society's inability to create a new generation of believers, the communities steadily declined and disbanded.
Little is known of the 20th Century Shakers besides their decline because they closed even their journals -- previously released in order to further spread first person witness of Shaker beliefs -- to the outside world in the first decades of this century. In 1965 this deterioration was speeded by a group decision to admit no new members. Today only the Canterbury, New Hampshire, and Sabbath Day Lake, Maine, communities remain.
This material was extracted from http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Shakers.html
For additional material on the Shaker community in Canterbury, New Hampshire, including educational and tour opportunities, see http://www.shakers.org.