The last Shakers

There are plenty of Shaker villages in the world, and every one of them is now a museum. Except Sabbathday Lake.

by Adrian Zupp

Shakers have dogs. Two of them set me back on my heels just inside the old brick Dwelling House at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker village in New Gloucester, Maine. I know about as much about dogs as I do about Shakers, but these look like a heavyset golden Lab and some kind of steroid-abusing German shepherd, and they look as if they can smell out a heathen. I beat a graceless retreat and wait for help to arrive.

"Shakers," I scribble in my notebook, "have dogs."

Shakers, it turns out, also have cars, telephones, CD players, TVs, computers, and employees. Shakers have their own Web site. Sabbathday Lake is the last surviving Shaker community on the planet, and I had imagined I would arrive here to discover some sort of Amish splinter group, but no -- the Shakers are very much in sync with the waning 20th century. The last outpost of a religion that embraces the credo "Hands to work and hearts to God," and that still resonates with the echoes of 19th-century simplicity, is also acutely aware that TV documentaries and the Internet are the best ways to gain exposure in 1999.

Still, it's the ways they're not in sync with the century that seem more interesting. While most of us, in our own ways, are the dream children of Madison Avenue, the Shakers consume only what they need. All property is communal. They are pacifists, they are completely celibate, and they have -- along with their dogs, and their cars, and their Web site -- a healthy sense of humor about how little the rest of us really know about them. After I'm greeted by Brother Arnold Hadd, and after he subdues the dogs, we enter a building and he waves his hand at the hallway light. "Yes, we actually have electricity," he says with a laugh.

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Until moved to the Northeast, I had never heard of Shakers. In Colorado, where I lived previously, they don't get much of a mention. And in Australia, where I'm originally from, they get about as much exposure as Plutonians. Not until I reviewed a play in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, called Journey to Heaven: The Shaker Way was my nosiness piqued. Driving up to Sabbathday Lake, up the Maine Turnpike, past the legions of frozen trees that seem to announce "new territory," I felt nervous. How should I act? Should I expect overwhelming . . . quaintness?

Sabbathday Lake is home to seven Shakers -- three men (brothers) and four women (sisters). Only six of them live in the community: Sister Minnie is presently in a nursing home. The roots of their religion stretch back to 1747, when Quakers James and Jane Wardley began holding religious services in their home in Manchester, England, that combined Quakerism with other religious influences and "ecstatic and violent bodily agitation in worship," as the Sabbathday Web site puts it. Thus began the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, a/k/a the "Shaking Quakers." Thirty years later, under the leadership of Ann Lee -- or Mother Ann, as she is referred to by the Shakers -- a small group of Shakers came to America and settled near what is now Albany, New York. A wave of religious revivalism created by the American Revolution brought new members to the fold, and by the 1830s, there were around 6000 Shakers living in 19 village communities from Maine to Kentucky. Since then, the tide has gradually been going out, leaving an intriguing flotsam of empty villages and now-valuable (and much-copied) handmade furniture. Two Shaker communities survived to the 1990s: one at Sabbathday Lake and one in Canterbury, New Hampshire. In 1992, Sister Ethel Hudson died, the last Shaker at Canterbury. And Sabbathday Lake was alone.

Brother Arnold Hadd is one of the two leaders, or elders, of the Sabbathday community. He is a bearded, plainly dressed man of 42 who gives the impression of considerable strength within his slight build. He ushers me to a comfortable sitting room on the second floor of the Dwelling House and, after kicking the dogs out, closes the door. It is quiet, peaceful. But the impression that overrides all others is that my genteel host is not . . . quaint.

"Sister Frances has had a fall and hurt her knee," he explains, settling into one of the sofas as I take the other. I find myself thinking: He looks just like everybody else. "She's having some therapy on it and won't be able to join us."

This is a blow. Sister Frances, a woman of 70 who came to the village when she was just 10 years old, has been described to me as an "effective leader" and a "powerful force," and I was eager to meet her. I press on -- if not exactly the cool professional, trying at least to seem professionalish -- all the while harboring the bubbling, irrational fear that a misplaced word, an imprudent question, will bring some ill-defined wrath down on me. I am the product of formative years spent in Sunday school and catechism classes.

I play it relatively safe and begin by asking how a 42-year-old in the 1990s becomes an elder in a gradually receding 250-year-old sect.

"It sort of fell to us more than anything else," says Brother Arnold, his voice even and markedly patient. "The community has to approve it, and it's not a lifetime appointment. It's for as long as the gift is active. Someone in a leadership position can be replaced by someone who seems more suited to it, or if they need to be moved on to something else."

Brother Arnold has been a Shaker for 21 years, coming to Sabbathday Lake as an adult. Of the seven members, four came to the village as adult converts and three grew up there.

"I came from Western Massachusetts originally," he explains. "I came here first of all when I was 18, as a visitor. I'd been writing to the community for almost two years and was invited by the late Brother Ted to come up and see the community myself. I didn't come with the intention of being a Shaker. I just wanted to see what it was like to be a Shaker in the late 20th century and how it worked."

Hadd spent a weekend at the village, and it changed his life. In 1977, at the age of 20, when guys his age were more likely to be donning white suits and practicing the Hustle in front of a mirror, he spent most of the summer at Sabbathday Lake and decided that Shakerism was for him. He subsequently appealed to the community to be considered for membership. They assented, and he returned for good in January 1978.

It was, in anyone's language, a big step. But to Hadd, at least, it was not a renunciation of the world.

"More than turning away, I was in tune to what I was turning to," he says. "I felt that I was embracing something that was higher and something that was better."

Arnold Hadd became Brother Arnold, the eighth living member of a community that was almost 200 years old. Today, while the community makes adjustments to stay in step with the economy at large, it's steadfast in its mission: to keep the Shaker faith alive. This, above all else, is what the Shakers wish to do.

One thing Shakers don't do is make chairs anymore. Nor do they dance, march, or twirl ecstatically. Those emblematic things are gone now. In fact, you could make the argument that the Shakers' most distinguishing feature, at this point, is their progressiveness. They believe in total equality of the sexes. They work hard at being self-sufficient. They're all for genuine freedom of speech. They believe in justice, kindness, and benevolence. Throw in the computers and the rest, and they're actually just like you and me, except maybe more restrained. And nicer.

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Shakers are also celibate, and above everything else, it seems people always want to know about the celibacy thing.

To be honest, so do I. Of course, in asking Brother Arnold about it, I have an angle: I want to know about the paradox arising from a religion that wants to endure but is not prepared to reproduce. It's a brilliant angle: How can a religion spread, or even survive, if one of its tenets is not to procreate? What would happen if we all became Shakers?

"That question has been the most-asked question of all time," says Brother Arnold. I sink a little deeper into the couch. "For that reason, the Shakers reprinted their tract on what should happen if all the world should become Shakers -- as a matter of fact, four or five times."

He hands me a photocopy of the tract. Its title is "A Shaker's Answer to the Oft-Repeated Question 'What Would Become of the World If All Should Become Shakers?' " The original publication date was 1874. I could have shown up 125 years earlier with my Celibacy Paradox angle and still would have been late.

On page two the tract states: "The great Architect has divers [sic] grades of workmen, all necessary in their places, in order to carry on the work, and complete the building." Shakers, in other words, are not out to convert the world.

"Monasticism is a calling," says Brother Arnold simply. "No matter if you're Protestant, Orthodox, or Catholic, it doesn't really matter. And we get that from the 19th chapter of Matthew (19:12); some are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs, some become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. So obviously the whole world is not going to become Shakers. They're not ready for it. It's a calling that you have to feel within yourself and want to live it."

In a sense, Shakerism is a triumph of democracy; it contradicts the assumption that being born into a household gives you the religion of that household. If you don't hear the calling, you're not expected to come.

"Not necessarily do children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren have a fervor or a desire to live a certain way of life," says Brother Arnold. "I could say that before I became a Shaker I was a Methodist. Well, why was I a Methodist and not something else? Because my parents were Methodist, that's why. And my father's parents were Methodist. I became a Shaker because I was looking for something and I thought that it fulfilled for me everything that I was yearning to obtain. And that was to serve God fully each and every day of my life as the focus of my life. It's not merely something that you do on Sundays or some other day of the week."

Darryl Thompson, now 41, grew up with the Canterbury Shakers as his extended family. His father worked for the Shakers, and Darryl, though he never became a Shaker himself, came to understand the faith the way that true outsiders rarely can. "They always feel that the world gets hung up on the celibacy issue," he says. "I mean, for them it's very simple. And a lot of the time they're just sort of baffled about why the world gets so hung up. Especially when Western Christianity has a 1500-year tradition of celibate communities. The Orthodox Christian church has monks and nuns, the Anglican church has it, the Catholic church has it, and so the Shakers are just sort of scratching their heads."

Thompson points out that the decline in the number of Shakers is due as much to outside historical forces as to celibacy. As the Industrial Revolution accelerated in the first half of the 19th century, with its production lines, economies of scale, and advanced technologies, it served to undercut the profitability of Shaker inventions and industry. This tended to turn the Shakers back to agriculture, which was less appealing to young people. Then, as the West opened up, many of the young folk who did choose to stay on the land were drawn to the new frontier.

Then, too, one of the primary sources of young members dried up. One of the Shakers' practices was to take in orphaned or abandoned children and raise them in the Shaker way. (This in itself did not make the children members of the church; that decision was theirs to make when they reached 21.) The advent of state orphanages and foster care gradually closed this doorway to the Shaker world. And finally, Thompson says, there was something of a decline in the Shaker leadership. Fewer members obviously meant a smaller talent pool.

"It wasn't just celibacy that caused the decline in numbers," says Thompson. "A lot of people misunderstood that. It was celibacy coupled with other factors."

Whether the Sabbathday Lake community's numbers will swell in the future remains to be seen. Recent years have brought a few newcomers to the fold -- the most recent joined last June -- but the community remains family-sized. Brother Arnold is adamant about one thing: it is a vibrant community, not a museum.

"How large is it going to be? No one knows. I pray that our houses are full again. But I don't know. I just think that we have to keep going on in faith and people will come."

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They come during the tourist season, at least. Monday through Saturday, Memorial Day through Columbus Day, they pay $5 to take the tour, and they buy Shaker herbs for $3 to $5 a tin. (The community also runs a mail-order business, selling herbs and teas.) For the Shakers, it is a way of bringing in revenue and giving out enlightenment, or at least clarification. ("There are a lot of people who give some pretty bizarre interpretations to Shakerism," Brother Arnold tells me. "And so it's our opportunity to set the record straight.")

Apart from Sabbathday Lake, there is still a sprinkling of restored, "uninhabited" Shaker villages in Massachusetts, Kentucky, and New Hampshire that the public can visit. In addition to these, there exist numerous Shaker museums that house Shaker artifacts. The largest of these is in Old Chatham, New York. These museums are generally operated by historical societies, not the Shakers themselves.

Though the Shakers of the Sabbathday village live apart from the world, they still consider it their world too: the world that their God created. They may be physically removed from it, but they have views just like the rest of us.

"Some people think that [the world] is in great moral decay," says Hadd, "and other people just point to the fact that we've been in moral decay since the beginning. I don't think people really change. I think the personalities and the situations just get repeated. And if you look hard enough back in history you just see it over and over and over. It's the world. And it's the way of the world and I think it's always going to be the way of the world."

Almost reflexively, at this point he explains that the Shakers are not looking for anything cataclysmic to happen in the year 2000. They are, however, looking to world leaders to attack problems like poverty and hunger, and to make universal the equality they have always embraced. "There's a lot of prejudice in our world that formulates itself out of hate and doctrine," Hadd says. "It all needs to be absolutely eradicated before we can go forward as a people. We need to be a lot more human and we need to be a lot more humanitarian."

Driving back down the Maine Turnpike, Sex Pistols CD blaring sweetly, convenience-store Twinkie clamped in my mouth, I can't be certain if I am re-entering the "real world" or, in fact, leaving it behind. I suspect that it is the latter. You don't find the kind of pure logic that Brother Arnold espouses in malls or singles bars. It feels pure because it lacks self-interest and hypocrisy; in their removal from what the rest of us think of as "the world," the Shakers are driven more by a higher sense of purpose than by a mere desire to escape.

Something in me is drawn to that, and something else keeps me away. Too long in the world, perhaps. All I can manage is to "take the tour" and make my own adjustments in my own way. And yet I can't help but feel that, in a fashion-driven, buy-now-pay-later world, my generation, and more to come, will be tossed onto the scrapheap of anachronism long before Brother Arnold and his people.

Peering out from the warmth of my car, I see the ice is slowly melting from the trees of northern New England. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

The Web site for the Sabbathday Lake Shakers is www.shaker.lib.me.us. Adrian Zupp can be reached at koolk@banet.net.