Shakers

• 1. Introduction

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  The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, now have three active members. In August 2025, April Baxter began living with the community at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, and that raised the number of active Shakers in the United States to three.

  At their peak, the Shakers numbered thousands of believers spread over 18 major communities. They are remembered for plain furniture, clever inventions and hymns. Yet every committed member also gave up marriage, sex and private property.

  That raises some odd questions. How does a movement that forbids having children survive for more than two centuries? Why did a sect nicknamed for its convulsions become famous for quiet craftsmanship? And who was the woman whose followers believed that Christ had returned in her?

  The last question comes first, in the industrial north of England.

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• 2. Mother Ann

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  In 1747, James and Jane Wardley broke away from the Quakers in the northwest of England. The Quakers were then cooling down their frenetic spiritual expression, and the Wardleys wanted the fire to stay lit. Their group became known as the Shaking Quakers, a nickname earned from seizure-like convulsions that swept through their worship.

  Meetings began in Bolton, Lancashire, where Jane Wardley, an articulate preacher, urged listeners to repent because the kingdom of God was at hand. More gatherings followed in Manchester, Meretown, Chester and other places near Manchester. The members described messages from the Holy Spirit and from God during silent meditation. They renounced sinful acts and expected the world to end soon. As their numbers grew, they were mobbed and stoned, and Ann Lee was imprisoned in Manchester.

  Ann Lee and her parents were early members, and Lee had joined by 1758. The group looked to women for leadership, because they believed Christ's second coming would come through a woman. In 1770, a "manifestation of Divine light" revealed Lee as that second coming, and she was called Mother Ann.

  Lee claimed revelations that tied the fall of Adam and Eve to sexual intercourse. She told followers to confess their sins, give up their goods and take up the cross of celibacy. Of her own conversion she said: "I felt the power of God flow into my soul like a fountain of living water."

  A revelation, supposedly received on the 19th of May 1774, sent Lee and eight followers sailing from Liverpool to colonial America. Among them were her husband Abraham Stanley, her brother William Lee and her niece Nancy Lee. Stanley abandoned her soon after they landed in New York City and remarried. The rest settled at Watervliet, New York, in 1776.

  The oath of allegiance was a problem. Swearing it was against their faith, so the members were jailed for about six months. Because they were punished only for belief, local sympathy grew and their ideas spread. Lee then traveled through the eastern states, preaching and declaring herself the second coming.

  She also described a vision of a large tree whose every leaf shone like a burning torch. To her, it stood for a Church of Christ that would one day be established in this land.

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• 3. Covenant and Villages

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  Joseph Meacham had been a New Light Baptist minister in Enfield, Connecticut, and was reputed to have the gift of revelation. In 1787, after Lee and her companion James Whittaker had died, he took over the Shakers and made New Lebanon their headquarters.

  Meacham brought Lucy Wright into the ministry beside him. Together they built the Shaker form of communal living, which amounted to religious communism. By 1793, property in each community had become a "consecrated whole."

  The 1790s also brought written covenants. Anyone who signed had to confess their sins, hand over property and labor to the society, and live as a celibate. A marriage ended the moment a spouse joined. Some less committed believers lived in noncommunal orders with their families. The Shakers did not forbid their marriages, but they judged the celibate state more perfect.

  Between 1787 and 1792, eight more communities gathered beyond Watervliet and New Lebanon. They stood in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine, and included Hancock, Harvard, Shirley, Tyringham, Canterbury, Sabbathday Lake and Alfred.

  When Meacham died, Wright carried on Lee's missionary tradition. Missionaries preached at revivals in New England, New York and farther west. Issachar Bates and Benjamin Seth Youngs won hundreds of converts. Wright introduced new hymns and dances to liven up the sermons. She also helped write Youngs' book The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, published in 1808.

  On the 12th of April 1805, Youngs and two companions held the first Shaker ceremony west of the Allegheny Mountains. It took place at James Beedle's cabin near Lebanon, Ohio. In 2019, the Warren County Historical Society moved that cabin beside the Harmon Museum in Lebanon.

  The missionaries followed the Cane Ridge revival of 1801-1803 into Kentucky and Ohio. Between 1805 and 1807 they founded Union Village in Ohio, South Union in Logan County, Kentucky, and Pleasant Hill in Mercer County, Kentucky. A second Watervliet appeared in 1806, in what is now Kettering, Ohio, and lasted until 1900. Whitewater followed in 1824.

  The westernmost community stood at West Union in Knox County, Indiana. Its nickname was Busro, after Busseron Creek.

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• 4. God Male and Female

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  Genesis 1:27 says that God created humans in his image, "male and female he created them." The Shakers read that verse as a statement about the Creator himself. In their view, God had a dual nature, both male and female.

  That idea shaped their view of Christ. Jesus, born of a woman and the son of a Jewish carpenter, was the male manifestation of Christ. Mother Ann, the daughter of an English blacksmith, was the female one. The Shakers saw her as the Bride made ready for the Bridegroom, and they believed that in her the promises of the Second Coming were fulfilled.

  Outsiders sometimes call this nontrinitarian. Modern Shakers disagree. They profess the divinity of Christ and say God has no sex in the human sense, though he may best be pictured with the attributes of both. In their reading, the Trinity was never false. It had simply been misread as wholly masculine, and Lee completed it by embodying the female side.

  The ethics followed from the sin. Adam's sin was understood to be sex, an act of impurity, so marriage was abolished among the Believers. They modeled their society on the Kingdom of God, where there would be no marrying. The four highest virtues were virgin purity, communalism, confession of sin and separation from the world. Without confession, no one could become a believer.

  The chastity was extreme. Men and women avoided even small contacts such as shaking hands, passing on the stairs or helping with a heavy load.

  Equality ran through the structure. The church was hierarchical, but at every level men and women shared authority. Two elders and two eldresses formed the Ministry at the top. Two lower-ranking elders and two eldresses led each family, with women overseeing women and men overseeing men. That arrangement kept leadership going when men were scarce. Shaker doctrine also held to racial equality.

  The rule of the Shakers was still not mixing the sexes. Their homes and workrooms were divided into men's and women's areas.

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• 5. Children Without Births

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  A foundling left anonymously on a Shaker doorstep was one way a child joined the community. Procreation was forbidden once someone joined, except for women who were already pregnant at admission. Children therefore came through indenture, adoption or conversion. The Shakers took in orphans and the homeless, and for children the life was structured, safe and predictable, with plenty of caring adults.

  At 21, girls and boys alike could choose to leave or fully convert. Many chose to leave, unwilling to stay celibate. Today there are thousands of descendants of people raised as Shakers who then departed.

  Work followed traditional gender roles. Women spun, weaved, cooked, sewed, cleaned and washed indoors. They also packaged goods for sale. In good weather, groups of sisters gardened and gathered wild herbs. The men farmed and worked at crafts and trades in their shops.

  In 1815, the Shakers at New Lebanon, New York, began keeping school. New York certified it as a public school in 1817. The teachers used the Lancasterian system, considered advanced for its time. Boys attended in the winter and girls in the summer.

  The first lessons covered reading, spelling, oration, arithmetic and manners. Later the curriculum grew to include music, algebra, astronomy and agricultural chemistry. Non-Shaker parents respected the schools so much that they sent their own children to them, and state inspectors who visited praised the teachers and pupils.

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• 6. Work as Prayer

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  "Put your hands to work, and your heart to God." That was one of Mother Ann's sayings on labor, and the Shakers kept it. Others were "Good spirits will not live where there is dirt" and "Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow." She also warned them against falling into debt.

  Every Shaker village ran a farm that used the latest scientific methods. The villages raised most of their own food and preserved enough to last the winter. Their livestock were fat and healthy, and their barns won praise for convenience and efficiency. Visitors admired their cleanliness, honesty and frugality.

  Beyond farming, the brethren and sisters pursued many trades. They made baskets, brushes, bonnets, brooms, homespun fabric and knitted garments. They were better known for medicinal herbs, garden seeds from the Shaker Seed Company and apple sauce. Maple syrup came from some New England communities, and many villages had their own tanneries. The Shakers were the first large producers of medicinal herbs in the United States and pioneers in selling seeds in paper packets. Brethren grew the crops while sisters picked, sorted and packaged them.

  The list of inventions is long. It includes Babbitt metal, the rotary harrow, the circular saw, the clothespin, the Shaker peg, the flat broom and a wheel-driven washing machine. There were also a threshing machine, metal pens, a new type of fire engine and a hernia truss. Tabitha Babbit and other prolific Shaker inventors did not patent their work, which later made it hard for 20th-century historians to say who came first.

  The Shakers held that making something well was itself an act of prayer. Their furniture was plain, durable and functional, usually made of pine or other inexpensive wood, so it was light in color and weight. The ladderback chair was a favorite. Around the time of the Civil War, the Shakers at Mount Lebanon, New York, stepped up production and marketing of chairs. Several furniture companies then produced their own versions of "Shaker" chairs. Genuine Shaker furniture is costly today.

  Their buildings were just as spare. Early timber and stone structures were built in a plain but elegant New England colonial style. Interiors had a peg rail, a continuous strip of hooks near lintel height, from which they hung clothes, hats and even chairs.

  The austerity softened late in the 19th century. Ornate carved furniture, patterned linoleum and cabbage-rose wallpaper appeared. At Hancock Shaker Village, the Trustees' Office was once spare and plain. It was "improved" with fish-scale siding, bay windows, porches and a tower.

  When the communities began to vanish in the 20th century, collectors shaped by modernism found the stark Shaker pieces appealing. The designer Kaare Klint borrowed Shaker styles in his own work.

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• 7. Songs and Visions

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  Shaker meetinghouses were painted white and left unadorned, since pulpits and decorations counted as worldly. Inside, worshippers marched, sang and danced, and sometimes turned, twitched, jerked or shouted. The earliest services were loud, chaotic and emotional. Later the Shakers developed precisely choreographed dances and orderly marches with symbolic gestures. Outsiders often mocked all this without grasping what the movements and songs meant.

  The Shakers composed thousands of songs. In their belief, a spiritual "gift" could be a musical revelation, so they recorded inspirations as they came. Scribes, many without formal training, used the letteral system, which wrote notes as letters of the alphabet, often without a staff. Many lyrics are syllables and words from unknown tongues, a kind of musical speaking in tongues. Some people guessed these were imitated from Native American languages and enslaved Africans' songs, but the melodies come from European scales and modes.

  Most early Shaker music is monodic, a single melodic line with no harmony. The hymns first traveled by word of mouth and letters, and many believers copied lyrics into their own manuscript hymnals. In 1813 they published Millennial Praises, a hymnal with lyrics only. After the Civil War came hymnbooks with four-part harmony. The last was published in 1908 at Canterbury, New Hampshire.

  In the late 1830s, a revival called the Era of Manifestations began. It was also known as the period of Mother's work, for the revelations said to pass down from the late Mother Ann. The spirit gifts appeared as dances, songs and "gift drawings," made by sisters including Hannah Cohoon, Rebecca Landon, Polly Reed and Polly Collins. Many of these drawings survive as important folk art.

  Isaac N. Youngs, scribe and historian of the New Lebanon Church Family, recorded much of this era. He wrote it into his Domestic Journal, his diary, Sketches of Visions and his history A Concise View of the Church of God. Thousands of spirit communications also survive in libraries and museums, including the Library of Congress and Hancock Shaker Village.

  The best-known Shaker song is Simple Gifts, composed in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackett around the time he moved to the community at Alfred, Maine. In 1944, Aaron Copland built the finale of his ballet Appalachian Spring on it. Martha Graham named the work, which had the working title "Ballet for Martha." Copland often said he was thinking of neither Appalachia nor a spring. The English songwriter Sydney Carter used the tune in 1963 for the hymn "Lord of the Dance."

  Doris Humphrey staged Dance of The Chosen, depicting Shaker religious fervor. In 1997, Dan Welcher composed Laboring Songs for large wind ensemble, drawing on tunes such as "Turn to the Right" and "Come Life, Shaker Life." Recordings made between 1960 and 1980 appear on the set Let Zion Move.

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• 8. The Long Thinning

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  During the American Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers found their way to Shaker villages. The Shakers, as pacifists, would not kill or harm anyone, even in wartime. They leaned toward the Union, yet fed and cared for soldiers of both sides. President Lincoln exempted Shaker men from military service, making them some of the first conscientious objectors in American history.

  The peace brought changes that the Shakers could not absorb. A postwar economy of growing mechanization produced goods far cheaper than their traditional methods could.

  The movement had reached about 5,000 full members in 1840, with 6,000 believers at the peak. From there it bled members. Because believers did not have children, there were few to replace those who died. Artisans could not compete with factories, and many renounced the faith to earn a living in the cities. Only 12 communities remained by 1920. Then new federal laws in the mid-20th century took adoption away from religious groups, which closed the last route for children to join.

  In 1957, after months of prayer, Eldresses Gertrude, Emma and Ida of Canterbury Shaker Village voted to close the covenant to new members. In 1988, Eldress Bertha Lindsay dismissed the young converts living at Sabbathday Lake: "Membership is closed forever." Canterbury dissolved by 1992, leaving Sabbathday Lake as the last village.

  The Sabbathday Lake community answers that covenants have no sunset clause, so it welcomes sincere newcomers. A novice moves into the dwelling house, and after a week signs an agreement protecting the colony from lawsuits over lost wages. After a year, the Shakers vote on admission. Full status, with a share in finances and in administrative and worship decisions, takes another four years. The village receives around two enquiries every week.

  On the 2nd of January 2017, Frances Carr died at Sabbathday Lake at 89. Only Arnold Hadd, then 58, and June Carpenter, 77, were left. The 2019 issue of the Shaker newsletter The Clarion also named a Brother Andrew.

  The community rejects the idea that Shakerism failed. Its statement calls Shakerism neither an anachronism nor "the final sad flowering of 19th century liberal utopian fervor." It says the faith teaches that "God is Love."

  In September 2024, The New York Times profiled Hadd and Carpenter as they prepared to mark 250 years since Lee reached New York. Hadd said: "We've survived 250 years. We are looking forward as much as our ancestors did to the next, whatever that involves. All we have to do is be ready."

  NPR reported in August 2025 that April Baxter was not yet a full member. By the community's own rules, her path to that status was only beginning.

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