The Shakers

Gay blades from Pittsfield, Mass., riding past the big brick house a century ago, might have smiled to hear them singing:

Oh, it is by holy living

That we gain an entrance there;

For communion with the angels,

Spotless robes we must prepare.

But the Shakers of Hancock, Mass., meant it. They prepared their spotless robes by maintaining strict celibacy in their community of 200-odd men and women--cohabitation of married couples was forbidden, and "sisters" and "brethren" had separate entrances and hallways in their houses. They lived lives of calculated simplicity, sheltered the indigent and orphaned, and diligently tried to carry out the teaching of their founder: "Put your hands to work and your hearts to God."

Today the community organized at Hancock, Mass., in 1790 is beginning a new phase of witness to the Shaker way. There are only 932 acres of pasture and farmland instead of some 5,000, and only 17 buildings instead of 34. And there are no Shakers at all. A nonprofit corporation made up largely of well-off summer residents of the Berkshires, titled Shaker Community, Inc., has opened Hancock Shaker Village to the public for seven days a week ($1 for adults, 50-c- for children), thus preserving the fossil of a unique movement in U.S. religious history.

Singing & Dancing. The term Shakers --like Quakers--was originally a derisive taunt by "the world's people"; their official name is the United Society of Believers. The society was founded by a puissant prophetess named Mother Ann Lee, the daughter of a British blacksmith, who brought her eight original disciples to America in 1774. They settled in Watervliet, N.Y. to live, in the words of Mother Ann, "as though you had 1,000 years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow."

Slowly the sect grew; whole families joined, and the ranks were swelled by the unmarried mothers and homeless children the Shakers took in. Book learning was not their specialty, but their unsparing attention to plain, practical craftsmanship has made Shaker furniture a landmark in the history of design. Visitors to Hancock Shaker Village are shown their graceful, high-backed chairs and the pegs around their rooms, about 6 feet from the floor, on which they hung the chairs when not in use, to make housecleaning easier. Their window frames were held in place by wooden thumbscrews, which permitted removal of the entire window for cleaning. Their meetings for worship were, like the Quakers', thrown open to the leading of the Spirit, without formal liturgy or ministry. Often they performed elaborate marches and dances, singing impromptu songs.

13 Sisters. Nineteen Shaker communities were founded, but the sect was doomed--partly by the growth of outside social services that drastically cut down the numbers of children brought to them to care for, but mainly by the Shaker birth rate of zero.

Today two colonies still function after a fashion. At Canterbury, N.H. (founded in 1792), eleven old "sisters" live in the remaining 25 of the original 38 buildings where once 400 men and women worked and danced and sang. And at the Sabbathday Lake Colony near Portland, Me., lives the last male Shaker in the world--Elder Delmar C. Wilson, 88, with 13 "sisters."

Elder Wilson arrived in Sabbathday Lake after his father died, when he was eight, and has been there ever since, doing everything in his time from tending cows and installing plumbing to painting pictures. "They say the good is never lost," mused Elder Wilson one day last week. "But it's sad that so many beautiful things have faded away. If we can't carry on. others will. Methods can be improved; principles can't, they say."

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