Model for the Frontier

"Put your hands to work and your hearts to God" was the maxim enjoined upon that curious Protestant sect known as the Shakers by their founder, Mother Ann Lee. An English mill-hand, Mother Ann founded the Shaker religion after having experienced her own mystical vision of the Second Coming (she somehow got the notion that she was He). Together with a handful of converts, Mother Ann emigrated to the U.S. in 1774.

By the 1860s, some 6,000 Shakers were living in 18 communities scattered from New England to Indiana. Today the sect is virtually extinct, since Mother Ann regarded sex as a device of the devil and Shaker "brothers" and "sisters" lived in separate dormitories. Their only mutual recreation was prayer meetings, at which they sang hymns and "shook" together in frenzied dances that must have looked like Saturday night at the Electric Circus.

Fortunately, in everything except babies, early Shaker craftsmen were astonishingly productive. They invented a flat broom, an apple parer, a circular saw and many other labor-saving devices. Even now, their spare yet elegant furniture and utensils seem so modern that they are sought after and copied by architects and designers. Shaker villages were oases of austere grace and functionalism. "Wherever you go, you feel that you are beyond the realm of hurry," wrote one visitor in 1877. "There is no restlessness, or fret of business, or anxiety; it is as if the work was done, and it was one eternal afternoon."

Dairy in the Round. This week, over the Fourth of July, thousands of Americans will visit the two remaining active Shaker communities--near Portland, Me., and Canterbury, N.H.--as well as others in Pleasant Hill, Ky., Old Chatham, N.Y., and Hancock, Mass., where original Shaker buildings have been converted into museums. There they can buy Shaker jams, inspect Shaker houses, recapture a whiff of that eternal Shaker afternoon.

The restored village at Hancock, Mass., is currently the most fascinating of all the communities. In Tune, it opened its giant Round Stone Barn. Built in 1825, the barn was widely cited during the 1880s as "machinelike in its efficiency" and "a model for the soundest dairying practices." Settlers on the Great Plains dotted the Western frontier with timber versions of it--most of which have now rotted away. By the time the Hancock village was taken over by the Berkshires' Shaker Community, Inc. in 1960, huge cracks had appeared in the Shaker barn's walls and the interior had fallen into ruin. Refurbished with the aid of nearly $500,000 from Frederick W. Beinecke, S. & H. trading-stamp executive, plus construction materials donated at cost by the George A. Fuller Co., the barn will be featured, in photographs, as part of a display in the U.S. pavilion at Osaka's 1970 world's fair.

Three Levels. The barn's design displays a canny combination of the practical and the monumental. Constructed of wood and stone within a 270-ft. circumference, it ranged cows and horses facing into a central core. At harvest time, wagons bearing fresh loads from the fields could enter by a separate driveway that led to the level above the stalls, then drive around the circle, distributing feed in the hayloft. A manure pit beneath the stable level permitted cow dung to fall through trapdoors and be easily carted away.

Today, with the animals gone, the visitor's eye is drawn to the delicate yet cleverly engineered network of wooden joists that support the roof. This inside structuring makes possible vast, interior spaces that seem as impressive, because of the humble materials used, as those of cast-iron railroad stations or steel-structured airline terminals.

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