Dancing with Doom
"The Shakers believed they were living in the last millennium,
the final page of humanity, and since all people shared a
brother/sister relationship, they should not marry as there was no
longer a need to procreate."
What do you do if you think the world as we know it is about to end and the human race, at its crowning glory, go extinct? That was what confronted Ann Lee in the squalid English dungeon where she had been tossed for espousing a radical form of Christianity.
If you are Ann Lee, you sing and dance.
Ann Lee responded to her powerful, apocalyptic doomer vision of 1722 by creating a whole new religion, one its detractors called the “Shaking Quakers” (because they danced and were pacifists) or simply “Shakers.” When she was released from prison she took her vision out into the world and found a large following.
In Mother Ann's view, the Second Coming had already happened, and
the world was inhabited now, not with a Christ in the flesh but in
Spirit. The world of industrial capitalism, clearances, sweat shops,
child labor, closures of the commons, oppression of women and
minorities, colonial wars, militarism and slavery is doomed to fail (as Jean-Baptiste
Joseph Fourier presaged a
century later with his discovery of the civilizational heat engine
and the greenhouse effect), as are people, and our role now, in the remaining days, is
to return Earth to a heavenly garden for eternity.
Therefore, no one needs to be acquiring and owning private
property. What is it good for, if abundance is everywhere? No one
needs to have slaves. No one needs to go to war. And no one should
bother to have children, because this is the final generation.
To borrow the opening lines from Arthur Bestor's Backwoods Utopias,
Unfortunately, the Shakers were sometimes met by violent mobs and
Ann Lee suffered violence at their hands more than once. Because of
these hardships Mother Ann became quite frail; she died at
Watervliet, NY on 8 September 1784, at the age of 48.
In August of 1805, three Shaker missionaries, John Meacham, Benjamin Seth Youngs and Issachar Bates (our Great-Great-Great Grandfather, more to be written on this), having traveled more than a thousand miles into the western lands by way of Cumberland Gap and the Ohio River, mostly by foot, arrived at a lovely knoll above the Kentucky River which they called Pleasant Hill.
Within a year, they had 47 converts living together on a 140 acre (57 ha) farm, the twelfth Shaker Village in North America. As new converts came in, they added more buildings and land, eventually reaching 4,369 acres (1,768 ha). By 1812 three communal families — East, Center, and West — each with about 100 members, had been formed, and a fourth, North, was established as a gathering center for prospective converts. On June 2, 1814, the Believers bound themselves together in a more formal covenant with the Shaker Ministry at New Lebanon, New York.
The year 1805 falls into a period of US history that is for some a
touchstone of the birth of a great nation, and for others the point
of disembarkation for genocide and clearances that continue today. It
fell between the War of Independence and a failed British attempt to
re-establish a colonial outpost in North America that would only end
with the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. In March, 1805, Thomas
Jefferson was sworn in for a second term. In April, Beethoven held
his baton aloft in Vienna for the first performance of the Symphony
Number 3. U.S. Marines stormed the shores of Tripoli in search of
Barbari pirates while Napolean was crowned King of Italy. On June 13,
Meriwether Lewis and four companions first sighted the Great Falls of
the Missouri River. In France, on July 29, Hervé Louis François
Jean Bonaventure Clérel, Comte de Tocqueville and Louise Madeleine
Le Peletier de Rosanbo, having just dodged the guillotine,
gave birth to their son, Alexis de Tocqueville.
Tocqueville would later write, after visiting the Shakers:
The site in Kentucky was on poor land a great distance from
Eastern markets, but by pooling their property and skills and
adopting wholesome, mindful work as their primary spiritual practice,
the colony prospered. They raised broom corn and made flat brooms so
good that when floated to New Orleans by river they returned home by the
Natchez Trace with saddlebags full of gold. They raised fruit and sold it
dried or as preserves (more than ten tons in one year). 
Like the
other emerging Shaker communities, they sold garden seeds through
catalog sales and by 1825 were a thriving, handsome community with
large stone and brick dwellings and shops, grassy lawns, and stone
sidewalks.
Their 40 miles of stone walls took 12 years to build.
They had a municipal
water system well before some towns in their area. By 1825 they
had spigots in their kitchens. Their mill
had an elevator
for moving grain to the upper floor, and they had a mechanical corn
sheller. Each large dwelling, housing 50 to 100 residents in
apartments, had a central kitchen and did laundry in machines run by
horse power.
One of their barns included an upper floor for storage of grain and hay, a cutting machine for chopping fodder, and an ingenious railway for delivering feed to the cattle. Even though it was the end of the world, their sense of security endowed them with creative energy that knew few limits.
Their association, according to the Shakers,
In the words of Horace Greeley,
The promise of such an undertaking was seen by the abolitionist
newspaper, The Liberator, in 1840:
By the autumn of 1808, Pleasant Hill was established in its
current location and in 1809 the Center Family Dwelling, now the Farm
Deacon's Shop, was finished. The following year a stone Meeting House
was built across the road from Center Family, but the New Madrid
quakes of 1811-1812 damaged its stone foundations. 
The foundations
were elaborately rebuilt with two-foot-thick freestack supports every
eight feet, and the roof made of great engineered arches to both
support the stomping and dancing of 500 Shakers on the first floor,
and to permit them to dance and sing unobstructed by support columns,
which were made more massive and placed into the 2-foot-thick outer
walls.
Access to distant markets for their goods and necessities required
them to lay roads and navigate the treacherous Kentucky River. In
1813, they established the first Shaker Ferry five miles North of
Pleasant Hill and constructed a wagon road on both sides of the
river, lined by their distinctive stone walls. They constructed a
North-South road that ran from the river, through the center of their
village and then South to Harrodsburg. When the railroad arrived, it
crossed the river by high iron trestle just upstream of the Shaker
landing.
Economic sustainability was a cornerstone, so brooms, seeds,
medicinal herbs, cheese, canned goods, buckets, straw hats, carpets,
cloth and shuttles moved on the river, first by flatboat, then
keelboat, and later by steam paddlewheel to Memphis, Vicksburg,
Natchez and New Orleans. Tool castings, building materials, pickling
spices, tea, sugar and glass jars came back the other way.
Something still more important was exchanged. “Shaker” as a
brand became associated with purity, frugality, and wholesomeness.
This was achieved first by the Seed Division, which produced the
nation's first mail order seed catalog and became the largest seed
company in the Hemisphere. Later it would be synonymous with Shaker
furniture, with its clean lines, lightweight sturdy material, and
perfect joinery.
As pacifists and abolitionists the Shakers ran afoul of local
opinion, especially in times of heated tempers, before and during the
War of Northern Aggression.
It is ironic that it should be the Great Civil War that brought
Pleasant Hill low, because that was a war, first and foremost,
between combatant paradigms. The rapidly industrializing northern
states, fueled by coal, oil (including whale oil), and the latest
energy saving machinery from England and Germany, could afford to
replace human slaves with energy slaves to considerable financial
advantage. They eyed the slave economy of the South, with its cotton
and coal wealth, as a way to supply their machines.
Abolition of
slavery was not a central goal of the war-makers, and indeed, the
Union, as it formed to oppose the Secessionists, contained the slave
states of Delaware,
Kentucky,
Maryland,
Missouri
and West Virginia.
The Shakers at Pleasant Hill were devout abolitionists. They
adopted the practice of buying and freeing slaves, and since freed
slaves could not work or own property in Kentucky, they offered them
sanctuary and equal stake as members of Pleasant Hill. In 1825 a
pro-slavery, anti-pacifist mob attacked Pleasant Hill and destroyed
some of its facilities.
Nonetheless, during the War the community fed thousands of soldiers, from both sides, who came marching up the North-South road, the main artery between Harrodsburg and Lexington, that passed straight through the center of the village.
Given the
choice between rape, pillage and plunder and Christian charity, the
Shakers poured out of their dwellings and placed food in the hands of
weary soldiers and cared for their wounds. Both armies "nearly
ate [them] out of house and home," a Shaker witness reported,
but they survived the war intact.
The worse tragedy came after the war, when Lincoln's policy of
reconciliation and restoration died with him and the original
Northern industrialist goal of regional subjugation returned to the
fore. The Shaker's lifeline, the river, was cut off to them, with all
Southern commerce on the Mississippi banned and high tariffs imposed
on Kentucky trade goods. 
Living in rural Tennessee, where rural internet and cell-phone service resembles what was available to Californians a quarter century ago, we can personally
attest that these policies continue in more subtle forms to the
present and most strongly affect border states like Kentucky and West
Virginia, where children are still forced by economic necessity
(student loans and medical blackmail) to go down into the mines and
pick at hard rock seams or operate giant bulldozers, scrapers and
cranes to remove whole mountains, to extract coal too dirty to be
burned in the United States for export to China.
The policy of celibacy insured that the Shaker religious society
would not long outlive the first generation, and by 1900, only 34
remained at Pleasant Hill. The Shaker community was dissolved in 1910
and in 1923, the last member, Mary Settles, died. She was pleased to
live long enough to see women's suffrage
and planned to vote a straight Democratic ticket on her first ballot.
She said that Shaker sisters had always had equal
rights within their communal society.
After her demise, the village slowly began going back to nature.
Some of the pasture land was used or absorbed into neighboring farms,
but occasionally pilgrims would arrive and marvel at what remained.
One such visitor was the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who wrote:
After Mary Settles passed, the land went into private hands and was parceled up. The Meeting Hall, with its well-supported grand ballroom, became an automobile repair garage. Oil stains the hardwood floors.
In 1961 a group of Lexington-area
citizens launched an effort to restore the property. By 1964 the
Friends of Pleasant Hill had organized a non-profit
corporation, raised funds for operating expenses, and secured a
$2 million loan to purchase and restore the site. Eight buildings
were restored by 1968 and placed on public display.
Today, with 34 original 19th-century buildings and 2,800 acres (1100 ha.) of restored farmland, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill is "the largest historic community of its kind in America." It is a place of continuing enchantment. Ann Lee herself recognized how revolutionary her ideas were when she said, "We [the Shakers] are the people who turned the world upside down." The walls echo the music and dance of a people who believed they were the last of their kind, but as it turned out, they weren't. At least, not yet.
What do you do if you think the world as we know it is about to end and the human race, at its crowning glory, go extinct? That was what confronted Ann Lee in the squalid English dungeon where she had been tossed for espousing a radical form of Christianity.
If you are Ann Lee, you sing and dance.
Ann Lee responded to her powerful, apocalyptic doomer vision of 1722 by creating a whole new religion, one its detractors called the “Shaking Quakers” (because they danced and were pacifists) or simply “Shakers.” When she was released from prison she took her vision out into the world and found a large following.
In Mother Ann's view, the Second Coming had already happened, and
the world was inhabited now, not with a Christ in the flesh but in
Spirit. The world of industrial capitalism, clearances, sweat shops,
child labor, closures of the commons, oppression of women and
minorities, colonial wars, militarism and slavery is doomed to fail (as Jean-Baptiste
Joseph Fourier presaged a
century later with his discovery of the civilizational heat engine
and the greenhouse effect), as are people, and our role now, in the remaining days, is
to return Earth to a heavenly garden for eternity.
Therefore, no one needs to be acquiring and owning private
property. What is it good for, if abundance is everywhere? No one
needs to have slaves. No one needs to go to war. And no one should
bother to have children, because this is the final generation.To borrow the opening lines from Arthur Bestor's Backwoods Utopias,
Little wonder then that Ann Lee escaped re-imprisonment in England for her scandalous beliefs in peace, gender equality, antislavery and common property by crossing the ocean and finding land in the North American wilderness, near to where Emerson would later stand and remark:The American Republic, remarked the aging James Madison to an English visitor, is 'useful in proving things before held impossible.'Of all the freedoms by which America stood, none was more significant for history than the freedom to experiment with new practices and new institutions. What remained mere speculation in the Old World had a way of becoming reality in the New. In this process, moreover, the future seemed often to unveil itself.
If the single man plant himself
indomitably in his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will
come round to him.
Unfortunately, the Shakers were sometimes met by violent mobs and
Ann Lee suffered violence at their hands more than once. Because of
these hardships Mother Ann became quite frail; she died at
Watervliet, NY on 8 September 1784, at the age of 48.In August of 1805, three Shaker missionaries, John Meacham, Benjamin Seth Youngs and Issachar Bates (our Great-Great-Great Grandfather, more to be written on this), having traveled more than a thousand miles into the western lands by way of Cumberland Gap and the Ohio River, mostly by foot, arrived at a lovely knoll above the Kentucky River which they called Pleasant Hill.
Within a year, they had 47 converts living together on a 140 acre (57 ha) farm, the twelfth Shaker Village in North America. As new converts came in, they added more buildings and land, eventually reaching 4,369 acres (1,768 ha). By 1812 three communal families — East, Center, and West — each with about 100 members, had been formed, and a fourth, North, was established as a gathering center for prospective converts. On June 2, 1814, the Believers bound themselves together in a more formal covenant with the Shaker Ministry at New Lebanon, New York.
The year 1805 falls into a period of US history that is for some a
touchstone of the birth of a great nation, and for others the point
of disembarkation for genocide and clearances that continue today. It
fell between the War of Independence and a failed British attempt to
re-establish a colonial outpost in North America that would only end
with the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. In March, 1805, Thomas
Jefferson was sworn in for a second term. In April, Beethoven held
his baton aloft in Vienna for the first performance of the Symphony
Number 3. U.S. Marines stormed the shores of Tripoli in search of
Barbari pirates while Napolean was crowned King of Italy. On June 13,
Meriwether Lewis and four companions first sighted the Great Falls of
the Missouri River. In France, on July 29, Hervé Louis François
Jean Bonaventure Clérel, Comte de Tocqueville and Louise Madeleine
Le Peletier de Rosanbo, having just dodged the guillotine,
gave birth to their son, Alexis de Tocqueville.
Tocqueville would later write, after visiting the Shakers:The Shakers believed they were living in the last millennium, the final page of humanity, and since all people shared a brother/sister relationship, they should not marry as there was no longer a need to procreate. Instead they believed people should live communally as a family of brothers and sisters. Children who arrived with married converts or were produced through accident or divine intervention could decide whether to remain in the community when they reached the age of majority."I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it."
The site in Kentucky was on poor land a great distance from
Eastern markets, but by pooling their property and skills and
adopting wholesome, mindful work as their primary spiritual practice,
the colony prospered. They raised broom corn and made flat brooms so
good that when floated to New Orleans by river they returned home by the
Natchez Trace with saddlebags full of gold. They raised fruit and sold it
dried or as preserves (more than ten tons in one year). 
Like the
other emerging Shaker communities, they sold garden seeds through
catalog sales and by 1825 were a thriving, handsome community with
large stone and brick dwellings and shops, grassy lawns, and stone
sidewalks.Their 40 miles of stone walls took 12 years to build.
They had a municipal
water system well before some towns in their area. By 1825 they
had spigots in their kitchens. Their mill
had an elevator
for moving grain to the upper floor, and they had a mechanical corn
sheller. Each large dwelling, housing 50 to 100 residents in
apartments, had a central kitchen and did laundry in machines run by
horse power.One of their barns included an upper floor for storage of grain and hay, a cutting machine for chopping fodder, and an ingenious railway for delivering feed to the cattle. Even though it was the end of the world, their sense of security endowed them with creative energy that knew few limits.
Their association, according to the Shakers,
is one of joint-interest, as the children of one family, enjoying equal rights and privileges in things spiritual and temporal, because they are influenced and led by one Spirit and love is the only bond of their union: As it is written, 'All that believed were together, and had all things common — and were of one heart, and of one soul.'
In the words of Horace Greeley,Not through hatred, collision, and depressing competition; not through War, whether of Nation against Nation, Class against Class, or Capital against Labor; but through Union, Harmony, and the reconciling of all Interests, the giving scope to all noble Sentiments and Aspirations, is the Renovation of the World, the Elevation of the degraded and suffering Masses of Mankind, to be sought and effected.
The promise of such an undertaking was seen by the abolitionist
newspaper, The Liberator, in 1840:Can society ever be constituted upon principles of universal Christian brotherhood? The believing Christian, the enlightened philosopher, answer — IT CAN. Will this organization commence with the entire race of man? With existing governments? Or with small isolated communities. Doubtless, the principles of this new organization must be matured in the hearts and lives of individuals, before they can be embodied in any community, but when the new organization commences, it will doubtless be in small communities.
By the autumn of 1808, Pleasant Hill was established in its
current location and in 1809 the Center Family Dwelling, now the Farm
Deacon's Shop, was finished. The following year a stone Meeting House
was built across the road from Center Family, but the New Madrid
quakes of 1811-1812 damaged its stone foundations. 
The foundations
were elaborately rebuilt with two-foot-thick freestack supports every
eight feet, and the roof made of great engineered arches to both
support the stomping and dancing of 500 Shakers on the first floor,
and to permit them to dance and sing unobstructed by support columns,
which were made more massive and placed into the 2-foot-thick outer
walls.
Access to distant markets for their goods and necessities required
them to lay roads and navigate the treacherous Kentucky River. In
1813, they established the first Shaker Ferry five miles North of
Pleasant Hill and constructed a wagon road on both sides of the
river, lined by their distinctive stone walls. They constructed a
North-South road that ran from the river, through the center of their
village and then South to Harrodsburg. When the railroad arrived, it
crossed the river by high iron trestle just upstream of the Shaker
landing.
Economic sustainability was a cornerstone, so brooms, seeds,
medicinal herbs, cheese, canned goods, buckets, straw hats, carpets,
cloth and shuttles moved on the river, first by flatboat, then
keelboat, and later by steam paddlewheel to Memphis, Vicksburg,
Natchez and New Orleans. Tool castings, building materials, pickling
spices, tea, sugar and glass jars came back the other way. |
| Deacon's House, likely home of Issachar Bates |
As pacifists and abolitionists the Shakers ran afoul of local
opinion, especially in times of heated tempers, before and during the
War of Northern Aggression.
It is ironic that it should be the Great Civil War that brought
Pleasant Hill low, because that was a war, first and foremost,
between combatant paradigms. The rapidly industrializing northern
states, fueled by coal, oil (including whale oil), and the latest
energy saving machinery from England and Germany, could afford to
replace human slaves with energy slaves to considerable financial
advantage. They eyed the slave economy of the South, with its cotton
and coal wealth, as a way to supply their machines.
Abolition of
slavery was not a central goal of the war-makers, and indeed, the
Union, as it formed to oppose the Secessionists, contained the slave
states of Delaware,
Kentucky,
Maryland,
Missouri
and West Virginia.
The Shakers at Pleasant Hill were devout abolitionists. They
adopted the practice of buying and freeing slaves, and since freed
slaves could not work or own property in Kentucky, they offered them
sanctuary and equal stake as members of Pleasant Hill. In 1825 a
pro-slavery, anti-pacifist mob attacked Pleasant Hill and destroyed
some of its facilities.
Nonetheless, during the War the community fed thousands of soldiers, from both sides, who came marching up the North-South road, the main artery between Harrodsburg and Lexington, that passed straight through the center of the village.
Given the
choice between rape, pillage and plunder and Christian charity, the
Shakers poured out of their dwellings and placed food in the hands of
weary soldiers and cared for their wounds. Both armies "nearly
ate [them] out of house and home," a Shaker witness reported,
but they survived the war intact.
The worse tragedy came after the war, when Lincoln's policy of
reconciliation and restoration died with him and the original
Northern industrialist goal of regional subjugation returned to the
fore. The Shaker's lifeline, the river, was cut off to them, with all
Southern commerce on the Mississippi banned and high tariffs imposed
on Kentucky trade goods. 
Living in rural Tennessee, where rural internet and cell-phone service resembles what was available to Californians a quarter century ago, we can personally
attest that these policies continue in more subtle forms to the
present and most strongly affect border states like Kentucky and West
Virginia, where children are still forced by economic necessity
(student loans and medical blackmail) to go down into the mines and
pick at hard rock seams or operate giant bulldozers, scrapers and
cranes to remove whole mountains, to extract coal too dirty to be
burned in the United States for export to China.
The policy of celibacy insured that the Shaker religious society
would not long outlive the first generation, and by 1900, only 34
remained at Pleasant Hill. The Shaker community was dissolved in 1910
and in 1923, the last member, Mary Settles, died. She was pleased to
live long enough to see women's suffrage
and planned to vote a straight Democratic ticket on her first ballot.
She said that Shaker sisters had always had equal
rights within their communal society.
After her demise, the village slowly began going back to nature.
Some of the pasture land was used or absorbed into neighboring farms,
but occasionally pilgrims would arrive and marvel at what remained.
One such visitor was the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who wrote:
[T]he marvelous double winding stair
going up to the mysterious clarity of a dome on the roof ... quiet
sunlight filtering in—a big Lebanon cedar outside one of the
windows ... All the other houses are locked up. There is Shaker
furniture only in the center family house. I tried to get in it and a
gloomy old man living in the back told me curtly 'it was locked up.'
The empty fields, the big trees—how I would love to explore those
houses and listen to that silence. In spite of the general decay and
despair there is joy there still and simplicity... Shakers fascinate
me.
After Mary Settles passed, the land went into private hands and was parceled up. The Meeting Hall, with its well-supported grand ballroom, became an automobile repair garage. Oil stains the hardwood floors.
In 1961 a group of Lexington-area
citizens launched an effort to restore the property. By 1964 the
Friends of Pleasant Hill had organized a non-profit
corporation, raised funds for operating expenses, and secured a
$2 million loan to purchase and restore the site. Eight buildings
were restored by 1968 and placed on public display.Today, with 34 original 19th-century buildings and 2,800 acres (1100 ha.) of restored farmland, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill is "the largest historic community of its kind in America." It is a place of continuing enchantment. Ann Lee herself recognized how revolutionary her ideas were when she said, "We [the Shakers] are the people who turned the world upside down." The walls echo the music and dance of a people who believed they were the last of their kind, but as it turned out, they weren't. At least, not yet.
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