Religion in American History Television: Shake It Like a Shaker in Enfield, NH

Randall Stephens

I like Ken Burns’s documentaries. I’m not one of those Burns haters, who accuses him of mawkish American exceptionalism. Nope, not me. Two of his films from the 1980s don’t get the kind of attention or airplay that they deserve. Thomas Hart Benton (1988) profiles the diminutive, scrappy regionalist painter who shared his name with “Old Bullion,” his great uncle, the tall, pugnacious senator from Missouri. Among other things, Benton taught Jackson Pollock how to drink. He taught him too well, obviously. The other film, a pole away, is The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), an elegiac, wistful tour of an American original. Narrated by the avuncular David McCullough, the film wonderfully weaves together interviews, dramatic readings, and ancient daguerreotypes. (True, in this regard it is like all the other Burns movies.)

Yep, I first learned what little I know about the Shakers from that film. Burns’s documentary made me intensely curious about this fading (nearly faded) religious movement that swept across the country in the 19th century. (In 2006 there were only four Shakers left, all living in southern Maine.)

What would posses Americans from Maine to Mississippi to leave kin, embrace celibacy, shun war and private property, and live in a utopian community? Who would join the ranks of such a diehard, committed few? (Good question for an American religious history class, eh?)

Beth and I got a glimpse into this fascinating world when we toured the Enfield Shaker Village and Museum in Enfield, NH, one morning in late February. The village sits in the valley between Mt. Assurance and Mascoma Lake. Founded in 1793, the community claimed several families of Shakers at its peak in the mid-19th century. The Shakers closed the village in 1923 after a long period of decline.

Leaving family and home for religious reasons was probably more difficult in the 19th century than it is now. (See Christopher Jones's interesting, related post from last week.) Who knows what kind of sorrow and anxiety men and women suffered as a result. What may be one small glimpse of this appears in a brief piece from an 1882 issue of the Shaker Manifesto, a 19th-century Shaker periodical:

CHARLES MINER, a well known member of the North Family Shakers, Enfield, N. H. committed suicide sometime during Monday night, on May 1st, shooting himself through the head with a small rifle, in his room, at Shaker Village. He was about 62 years of age. This Spring he had charge of the sugar camp and to the many who visited him there, [he] seemed to be social and happy, but at other times he has shown signs of being a little "out." Lately he talked of leaving the Shakers, and only the P.M. before he shot himself, he was over in the village at North Enfield, endeavoring to obtain employ. His dead body was discovered in his room, on Tuesday morning, the rifle by his side.

Our excellent

tour guide at Enfield, Arthur Gagnon (interviewed in the Youtube clip embedded here), told us about some of the trials and tribulations of the Shaker community. We spent much of our time roaming around this hollowed ground not far from Dartmouth College. We viewed the gathering room, where Shaker worshippers performed their increasingly formalized, wheel-within-a-wheel dances. We saw the handicrafts made by the elders and elderesses of the commune. And we also got to know a little more about the people who once lived, worked, prayed, and sometimes squabbled with their neighbors here.

The lake and surrounding countryside are lovely. I can only imagine how beautiful the site is at the peak of summer.

Leaving the Shakers for Love

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine wrote to the last remaining community of Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, seeking permission to stay with them for a couple of weeks and observe their day-to-day lives and worship and then create poetry based on her observation and participation. Her lofty goal was not without precedent---the Quiet in the Land project had done it in 1996---but her query was met with silence. Undeterred, my friend and her mom set out to visit Sabbathday Lake (along with a number of other Shaker historic sites) in the summer of 2007.

While visiting Watervliet, New York, site of the first Shaker village in America, my friend first heard rumors that one of the four remaining Shakers living at Sabbathday Lake had renounced his vows and left the community to pursue a romantic relationship with a journalist who had recently written a piece on the community. Upon reaching Maine, the rumor was confirmed to be true, and my friend and her mom joked that the Shakers’ silence in response to her initial inquiry was because they were afraid of losing the only other remaining male member of the community.

So it was with interest that I read “He left the Shakers for love” in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine a couple of weeks ago. The story---written by Stacey Chase, the journalist who fell in love with Shaker Wayne Smith while profiling the community---details the development of their romance, beginning with seemingly innocent flirting during her initial trips to the village and culminating in their September 2008 marriage. I was struck while reading by a couple of things. Chase curiously compares Smith’s renouncing his Shaker commitments in pursuit of love to other defectors throughout history:

Seven months after we met, he renounced his religious vocation and vow of celibacy after 26 years at the Sabbathday Lake community to pursue our relationship. It was 2006, and he was 43. “Sometimes you just know,” he says, tapping his heart, “here.”

Others have made similar sacrifices: King Edward VIII abdicated his throne; Maria Kutschera, later von Trapp, left the abbey; and, recently, Miami priest Alberto Cutie abandoned the Catholic Church. Only . . . the English monarchy and Roman Catholicism weren’t facing extinction. As the youngest Shaker (in 2006, the other members were 49, 67, and 79), Wayne would likely have become the last Shaker, and that prospect weighed heavily on him. His sudden departure not only shocked the three remaining Shakers, but it was as if it validated the protracted, public deathwatch of the Shaker faith.

I also found interesting the conditions of his leaving the community---Smith was granted a three-month grace period “to extricate himself from life at Sabbathday Lake,” while the community pooled together their limited collective resources and provided Smith with a used truck and $9,000 cash with which to start his new life. The two discreetly dated during the grace period (Chase remembers that they “dated discreetly, but it felt sickening, as if I were seeing a married man”), and then three months to the day that Smith officially became an ex-Shaker, he proposed. Despite the assistance provided to Smith upon his departure, “most of those associated with the [Shaker] order distanced themselves from Wayne---which stung him deeply.”

In Chase's telling, their story is one in which love trumps religious commitment, and everything works out in the end. Today the two are happily married, share a common faith (Smith converted to Methodism prior to their marriage), and Smith works as a maintenance worker at a biotechnology firm---a seemingly mundane ending to this anything-but-ordinary episode of amorous defection. Not particularly familiar with other instances of defection from the Shaker community in the past, I’d be interested in how this fits into that larger framework. How common is dissent and defection in Shaker history? Are there instances similar to this? How do the remaining Friends view the dissenter? Anybody know?