The Utopian Society That Still Lives

When I lived in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, I would often drive the back roads to explore interesting places and historical sites. I have also long been a fan of religious societies that have chosen to set themselves apart from the modern world, such as the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Quakers, Amana, Corning and, in the case of New Hampshire, the Shakers.

Before the end, in the mid-1950s, there were around 14 Shaker sisters living at Canterbury in New Hampshire. The last brother had died in 1939. There had always been more Shaker women than men, all the way back to 1747, when United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing was founded in England and later brought to America by Mother Ann Lee. Their enemies had named them Shakers or “Shaking Quakers” for their ecstatic worship, for trembling and throwing themselves about and speaking in tongues. Those days were more than a century gone. The Shakers were a quiet, pious, dedicated lot, their lives shaped by thousands of days of work and devotion into a work of art itself. The Canterbury sisters were living in the twilight of the Shaker utopia.

In New England today, there are remnants of three Shaker villages: Canterbury, New Hampshire; Sabbathday Lake in Maine; and Hancock, Massachusetts (One of the most famous). At their peak in the mid-19th century there had been 19 Shaker communities and perhaps as many as 6,000 Shakers. Besides the furniture for which they are famous, they had written or adopted some 10,000 songs, which were, the Shakers claim, not written, but received.

Sister Lillian Phelps arrived at Canterbury at age 16 sick with tuberculosis. The sisters nursed her back to health. Lillian played the organ every Sunday and gave music lessons.

The sisters were at loose ends. With the death of their last brother in 1939 they had lost a powerful dynamic. They believed that God was male and female, that men and women, each working in their own sphere, were equal. And they were short of labor. They could no longer run their farm. For that they had to rely on hired hands. They turned to fancy work, to sewing and selling baked goods. If the Shakers’ work was participating in God’s creation, what happened when their work no longer sustained a self-reliant community?

Eldress Emma B. King, whose stern manner had left her to be called, out of her hearing, Emma be King. She was in charge of the hardest decisions of their declining years, including closing other villages and the religion itself to new converts. As they closed buildings and villages, she had to weigh many requests by those looking to carry off a piece of Shaker heritage. The sisters were often asked to sell their furniture, tools, music, and historical documents.

Since their earliest days, the Shakers had invited the World’s People - as non-Shakers were called - to witness their worship services. The sisters welcomed everyone who found their way to their hill in Canterbury, a small town 14 miles north of the state capital, Concord. Canterbury Shaker Village was 29 buildings on a hill, mostly wooden, mostly painted white, lined up neatly with rows of old maples and white fences. It was pleasing, the buildings - large and small houses and barns - set out as a child might, lacking the usual configuration of buildings facing a street or a parking lot. In this setting visitors found harmony, serenity, simplicity, solace for the soul.

In their last decades, they did not play the part of the pious Shakers. They did sing Shaker songs, but they surprised people with their sense of humor and TV watching.

There were, by the 1950s, more buildings than sisters. At the village’s peak in the 1840s there had been 260 Shakers living and working in more than 100 dwelling houses, barns, workshops, farm buildings, and nine water-powered mills running on an extensive system of seven ponds and dams. On 3,000 acres they grew apples and peaches, made maple syrup and candy, and ran a productive dairy in New Hampshire’s largest barn. They sewed distinctive women’s cloaks; made wooden pails, boxes, and baskets; sold packaged seeds; ran a print shop; and patented a steam-powered washing machine. Their neighbors may have been puzzled by, or even hostile to, their faith, but they respected the Shakers’ prosperity. As their population shrank, they took down buildings and sold land until they had about two dozen buildings and hundreds of acres in hay fields, orchards, and woods.

The Shakers had a wild beginning. In England, the woman who was to become Mother Ann Lee joined a small group of renegade Quakers who regarded themselves as the only true believers. They would charge into churches to disrupt services. They repeatedly spent time in jail. Mother Ann, with seven others, arrived in America in 1774 on the eve of the Revolution. Being English, they were suspected of being spies and spent more time in jail.

Mother Ann’s Shakers are not the Shakers we know. They are not the pious, well-ordered, “hands to work, hearts to God” industrious makers of spare, beautiful chairs, songs, and art. The Believers are spirit-drunk; they speak in tongues, dance and shout, make so much joyful noise unto the Lord that their church services are “a perfect bedlam.”

Ann and her small band travelled through Massachusetts and Connecticut seeking converts. They were attacked, clubbed, caned, whipped, thrown from bridges. In Petersham, Massachusetts, Ann was dragged down a set of stairs “feet first” and thrown into a sleigh like “the dead carcass of a beast,” fracturing her skull, an injury which may have led to her untimely death a year later at age 48.

After Ann’s death, Father John Meacham established the leadership of elders, eldresses, deacons, deaconesses, and trustees. He set up communal villages and formalized the three key tenets of Shaker belief: celibacy, communal life, and confessing your sins. Order was now the face of Shakerism. But the spirit life broke out once more in the 1830s.

Spirits directed the Shakers to create holy feast grounds and to take up holy names for their villages. Canterbury was Holy Ground, and nearby Enfield was Chosen Vale, and so the map of America was populated with the holy: Holy Land, Holy Mount, Holy Grove, Lovely Vineyard, Pleasant Garden, City of Love, City of Peace, Vale of Peace, Wisdom’s Valley, Wisdom’s Paradise.

The Shakers no longer shook and trembled, but they still lived life on the boundary between this world and the next. Another monastic, Thomas Merton, knew that boundary. Merton had visited the Shaker village not far from his own Kentucky monastery.

They were almost all orphans. The sisters’ lives as Shakers began with a death in the family. They were passed from hand to hand until they arrived under the Shakers’ care. One of the sisters, Eldress Bertha Lindsay, arrived at Canterbury in 1905 on a stagecoach. Her parents had died within a month of each other. Her older sister headed west to get married, left Bertha, almost 8, in Canterbury.

The best thing the Shakers ever did was raise all those children who fell through the cracks. That is better than any round barn or oval box. They provided homes for children, and most of them left over time. It was a very generous thing to do.

Alberta MacMillan Kirkpatrick was the last girl raised by the Canterbury sisters. By age 11 she had lived in six different foster families. The day Alberta arrived in 1929 she was scared. Alberta grew up, and at 18 she wanted to go out into the world.

Late in life they faced losing their home again. Eldress Emma was prepared to close the village; she was selling furniture.

Canterbury would become an open-air museum, but one that was more than they could imagine. The entire village, and the old orchards and hay fields and ponds.

The sisters, Lillian, Bertha, and Marguerite took field trips to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, and Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

Canterbury could be like those museums, collections of old buildings and tools with guides who were sometimes in costume, except that those museums had been assembled with buildings from many places and the guides were dressed up to portray the past. Canterbury was in place, and there were even a few living Shakers who could play themselves - but there would be no dress-up. The Shaker costume was a religious habit. They would not have their villages turned into a masquerade.

Emma agreed to the museum - temporarily - until the village was sold to a religious or charitable group, and the last sisters were in a nursing home. In some ways the change to a museum was a new “gathering into order,” the next generation of the Shakers’ idea. The first museum was set up in the Meetinghouse and they opened a few buildings, containing a collection of Shaker furniture and tools. When visitors began arriving, Bertha and later Gertrude welcomed them - they were “guests, never tourists”. The first year as a museum in 1960, 500 guests dropped in for a visit. The young museum was amateur in the best sense of the definition: “something done for the love of it.”

The World’s People came first a few dozen at a time, then 50 to 100 on a summer’s day, and then 40,000 and 75,000 in a season. Some were surprised to be greeted by a living Shaker. Mostly it was all they could do to keep from saying, but-we-thought-you-were-all-dead.

Bertha and Gertrude looked like grandmothers from another century. People saw what they wanted to see in the sisters: living antiques; models of serenity and sanctity in a time of Mutually Assured Destruction. Constancy. They were formal. They lived their belief, to do good work aiming for perfection, but accepting that they would fall short. They were sure in their faith even as the Shaker life was fading. They were still Believers, and that is what they wished people would see.

Eldress Emma B. King died in 1966. With Marguerite and Bertha in charge, the museum would be permanent. It was formally incorporated in 1969. The Shakers were unique, benevolent, and charitable. We can learn from them and try to be better people.

The Canterbury sisters had left the young museum a puzzle: How do you make a museum about faith? At each stop on the tour, in each building, there was a showpiece, something that would grab the attention of even the husbands trailing along at the back of the group. They showed the Shakers’ cleverness - the tilting feet on chairs, a long-handled broom to sweep the ceilings of barns, the clothes-drying racks that rolled out of the wall. The Shakers were the first people in this country to raise, package, and sell Garden Seeds and Medicinal Herbs and were the only successful communal organization in America.

Guides were frequently asked about the Shakers’ celibacy.

Canterbury Shaker Museum is a witness for the Shakers who had gone before, a witness to the existence of this community and the things they had done, rescuing them from what could be oblivion.

The museum is a unique display of the wonderful potential of the human spirit. It is very idealistic. People going to the village and on the tour react in ways that show this is far more than just visiting a historical site (such as Williamsburg). There is something authentically spiritual about the place.

When the Shaker people started out, they were considered an insignificant little group. People did not pay much attention to them. Some of the more sophisticated people described them as just a candle in the sun. Not very important. They went about living their life quietly. There was a period when people looked and said, ‘Oh they’re dying out. They were good people, kind people. Too bad.’ And then students and scholars took a second look, and they jumped back in utter amazement at what this little group of people had achieved. Their membership started decreasing. People are amazed at what this group has done.

The Shakers, by the 1970s, were like a national pet. They were seen as a living museum of old-time American values of hard work. There were lavish books, museum exhibits, documentaries. Shaker furniture was bringing astounding prices. Celebrities were bidding serious money to collect simplicity and grace. To the World’s People in the late 20th century, the Shaker religion was an American edition of a Vermeer painting: a few objects, daylight slanting in the window, stillness, silence, and grace.

The Shakers became a product with Shaker chair kits, all manner of “authentic” Shaker touches like Shaker kitchen cabinet pulls, and “Shaker polo” shirts from Lands’ End. The Shakers were upstaged by their good work, their beautiful furniture and villages, their smart inventions. They were prisoners of their furniture.

By dying off the Shakers had fulfilled the definition of utopia: the good place that is no place.

In the end, only two sisters lived in the 56 rooms of the large Dwelling House, Alice Howland and Ethel Hudson with her six-toed cat, Buster. One sister and a longtime resident who had never signed the covenant lived in another large house. The other three sisters - Lillian, Bertha, and Gertrude - lived across the road in the Trustees’ Office. They were too few to pray in the Meetinghouse. They attended church in Concord.

Carrying a belief across generations is an achievement, a Herculean effort to maintain clarity of purpose and practice amidst the muddle of human emotions. The question is not why they died off, but how did they hold it together for so long?

Eldress Lillian Phelps died in 1973, Eldress Gertrude Soule in 1988, Eldress Bertha Lindsay in 1990, and the last, Sister Ethel Hudson, in 1992, and for the first time in 200 years, since they were “gathered into order” at Canterbury, the Believers were gone. A few Shakers remained at Sabbathday Lake, but that part of America that was the City of Peace, the Chosen Vale, Holy Ground, that part of America was no more.

Established historical museums were struggling to hold the public’s interest.

When I visited Canterbury on a raw, windy day one March, I walked uphill to the front of the Meetinghouse and stood there looking out at the rolling fields below. I felt reassured standing there. The place hums; it smiles back at you. It is what the ancient Celtics called a thin place, where heaven and earth are close, a holy place.

Two hundred years of devotion changed that hilltop. But there is also a lot of hardship in the Shakers’ story. Hiding in there is an unreckoned ratio of suffering to contentment. What does it take to create a few acres of peace? And would we know peace - true peace, not just the walled-off opposite of no war and no hate, but peace - would we know it if we see it? It is there on that New Hampshire hill. It feels powerful, deep, resonant. No good is ever a failure.