Flo Morse - The Story of the Shakers

Copyright 2016, 1986 by Flo Morse

All rights reserved

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Morse, Flo.
Title: The story of the Shakers / Flo Morse.
Description: Woodstock, VT : Countryman Press, 2016. | Previously published:
1986. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037127 | ISBN 9781581573411 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Shakers.
Classification: LCC BX9771 .M67 2016 | DDC 289/.8dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037127

ISBN 978-1-58157-551-4 (e-book)

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TO THE MEMORY OF
MOTHER ANN LEE
IN THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY
YEAR OF HER BIRTH ON
FEBRUARY 29, 1736

Sister Ethel Hudson sits on the side of her hospital bed, her legs dangling in warm slippers. At 89, tiny, lightweight, witty, and well except for a skin condition, she is having treatments at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, far from her East Canterbury, New Hampshire, Shaker home.

She is lonesome for her cat, Buster, who came to her door as a kitten. She shows me his picture.

He has six toes on each paw, she tells me.

I marvel.

I ask her what she thinks about the future of her Shaker faith.

She says, I dont think anybody wants to be a Shaker anymore, do you?

Yes, I think some do, I say.

I ask if there is anything I can bring her.

With a twinkle, she says, I love maple walnut ice cream.

I promise to bring some. And she says,

Ill tend to it right away.

Let me tend to my acknowledgments.

Thank you, Sister Ethel, for our conversations at the hospital. I also thank Eldress Bertha Lindsay and Eldress Gertrude Soule for their time and hospitality, and Richard Kathmann for his cooperation and information about Shaker Village at Canterbury.

I am very grateful for help on the update of the Shaker story to Brother Ted Johnson, Sister Mildred Barker, Sister Frances Carr, and Brother Arnold Hadd, of Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

Elmer Ray Pearson was generous in providing photographs for the original chapters in Yankee Communes: Another American Way. This was the first printing of some of the stereograph views from his archive.

My thanks also to Dr. David Starbuck of Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute; to Walt Chura of the Simple Gifts mission in Albany; to my friend Alfreda Hovey Beck, of Woodstock, Vermont, who grew up among Believers at Mount Lebanon, New York; to Peter Jennison and The Countryman Press; to Geneva Menge, librarian of my hometown Lyme Library; and to my husband, Joe, untiring editor-at-home.

I gratefully acknowledge all others who encouraged and aided me in writing this introduction to Shakerism and to the Shakers of yesterday and today.

FLO MORSE
Lyme, New Hampshire

THE
STORY
OF
THE
SHAKERS

... I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations... says the Lord of hosts.

THE OLD TESTAMENT, Haggai 2: 67

And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

THE NEW TESTAMENT, Acts 2: 4447

The Shakers: A Religious Community
in an American Tradition

A better world is hard to come by, but thats not for want of trying. Over the ages countless ways to improve society have been tried, and one of the most persistent has been living in community. In America a native tradition of separate, single-minded communities, following their own way of life, began when the Pilgrims arrived. It blossomed in a golden age of idealistic, utopian communes in the nineteenth century, when the nation was dotted with small, independent communal villages living according to an amazing variety of new social and economic systems.

Among these were religious groups like the Shakers who tried to create heaven on earth. More than most of the reformers, the Shakers succeeded. During the eighteenth century, when they sailed to the New World from England, and the nineteenth, when Shakerism reached its zenith, thousands of men and women, and sometimes entire families, left their homes to live in the Shaker way.