It's spring break time where we live in Indiana, and since the girls were both out this week Leonie and I started looking for an interesting place to go in America that we had never been before within an 8 hour drive. Ultimately our destination will be to spend 4 days in Asheville, North Carolina but we also like to break our trips up to no more than 5 hours of driving a day and so we started looking for something worth seeing at roughly the halfway mark. Not quite halfway but just south, southwest of Lexington, KY is an intact Shaker Village that does interactive tours. When we started looking for places to stay nearby we also realized that they allowed you to lodge at the Shaker Village, they had a very nice restaurant that served all three meals and the rates were quite reasonable so we booked a one night stay on the hopes it would be interesting.

Now obviously, I love furniture and if you know anything about the Shakers they had a knack for handcrafted goods, and they were especially known for handcrafted furniture so I was very much looking forward to this visit.

Wow - we were very, very impressed. We highly recommend you go - and stay the night or two.

I won't try to give a complete history of the Shakers. But if for some reason you have never heard about them they started in England in the early to mid 1700's and handful of them came over to America in the 1750's to try and start new communities. Not a great time to come to America if you were English but they found some converts in the upper NE of America, especially New York and other New England states. By the late 1780's they were starting to spread towards the west and got as far as Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. The Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill became established in the early 1800's and soon became the third largest Shaker community peaking at roughly 500 converts in the mid 1800s.

file photo - actual shakers
file photo - re-enactment

Since I was using my iphone I also grabbed a few file photos from the web so I will try and label them where I can of outdoor shots. But I Highly encourage you to look online.

This used to be the main highway for the county
In front of our dwelling for the night - note there are two entrances to every major building - one for the men (brothers) on the left and one for the women (sisters) on the right.

When we checked in we were greeted with the news that we would be staying at the West Family Dwelling. What we did not realize when we booked is that you actually stay in the actual rooms where the Shakers stayed. The rooms have been modernized with electricity and bathrooms in every room but other than that they maintain all the aspects of the buildings built in the early to mid 1800s.

1850's Hotel with all the amenities
TV hidden in cabinet on wall - but otherwise very authentic and tasteful

Leonie and the girls in our rooms for the night. Beautifully appointed with modern interpretations of the original Shaker furniture. The only upgrades being they have modern mattresses and the cabinet above Leonie is a cleverly disguised TV cabinet.

Every peg can be used. Very practical. Sometimes they are used to hang pictures, here they serve to keep unused chairs off the floor but easily ready.

Note the wood trim around every wall of every single room in every building. The shakers believed very strongly in order and they had painted horizontal chair rails that went around at waist height in every room to prevent furniture from rubbing the paint off the plaster walls and at door top height in every room they had a second horizontal rail with Shaker pegs every 12 inches or so. Imagine a peg on every wall every 12 inches in every single room of every building. The pegs served a very practical purpose. They believed in relatively tidy and austere environment, but the pegs were there for organization. They were there to hand clothes, pictures, candlestick holders, and even furniture to keep as much off the floor as possible.

The Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill was like many of the other Shaker Villages in that it peaked in the mid-late 1800's and by the early 1900's it started to decline. So much so that by the 1920'1930's nearly no Shakers were left in the village. The once quant road that ran right down the middle of the Shaker Village had become a major highway complete with telephone and electrical poles and most of the original buildings had been converted to private homes, a Church, some of the larger ones became roadside hotels etc... But most of the buildings had been torn down. By the 1960s the State of Kentucky made an active campaign to save the Village buying up the remaining 30+ buildings and moving the road 1/4 to the edge of the village and returned the Village to what it looked like in the mid 1850s.

Cheeky goat with a worn out replica chair.

The Shakers were a religious community that lived in a communal lifestyle. All work and wealth was community property. They maintained animals and they sold farm goods and created crafts for sale to maintain their wealth. Most Shaker's were especially known for high quality handcrafted - almost luxury - high end house goods for the middle class. Their goods were not fancy, but they were all practical. Many associate Shakers with furniture but the sale of furniture depended largely on the local economy and this part of Kentucky was not affluent so the Shakers at Pleasant Hill followed the same style of furniture as in other Shaker Communities but the bulk of their furniture was made for their own use and for occasional patrons who could afford furniture.

even the rafters are beautiful and serve a very important purpose.

The Shaker dwellings were simple but of exceptional quality. All of the remaining buildings are original. So they tend to stand the test of time. The above attic space was the space above their worship hall (Shakers called these halls their "meeting halls"). They had very particular style of religious rituals required them to all meet together in a single hall where they would worship and dance in groups together. No columns were allowed in the hall so they devised these trusses in the attic as the bearing system to hold the entire span of the roof and second floor so the entire 40 foot by 60 foot clear floor of the first floor could be open. All the weight of the top two floors flows down the rafters and into the large posts at the exterior walls of the building.

His and Hers stairs
Beautiful, and still functional - solid as a rock.

Shakers lived in communal houses. Many try to associate Shakers with modern day worshipers who look like they might have looked in the 1850, most commonly the Amish. But that would be incorrect. Amish live in single family groups or extended families in adjacent houses and farms and they come together to worship. The Shakers all lived together in a commune. The most striking difference of the Shakers is that once you became a full fledged Shaker you took a voluntary vow of celibacy. They believed they were trying to live a style of heaven on earth where we no longer needed to be married or have children.

In many ways they were very progressive. They believed men and women to be completely equal. Each house had one male elder and one female elder but all females slept on the East wind and all males slept on the West wing of the house. The house was 100% equal, but divided right down the middle. To avoid temptation they each had to use separate stairs so in each house you will see the houses are divided in perfect harmony - one set of stairs on the east and one set of stairs on the west.

The quality of the buildings was exceptional. The best example was in the one building open to the public - the "trustees hall" which had these spectacular three story spiral staircases and again they were in perfect pairs, one on the east and one on the west of the same landing.

Do not adjust your set - these are the exact same, but one goes clockwise and the other goes counter clockwise. I took these two photos from 6 feet apart. One for men and one for women. Beautiful craftsmanship.

But of course most of us (myself especially) love to look at the finely crafted Shaker furniture. I must admit that the chairs can be a bit uncomfortable as they are quite erect. But the craftsmanship is excellent. The two above are replicas for the guests, but you'd have to look very hard to tell the originals from the replicas.

When you get into the buildings being used for the authentic furniture you'll get a cheeky reminder not to touch.

This chair was a clever adaptation of a rocker that they knocked the rockers off to create a rudimentary wheelchair. The back wheel is just a simple castor, but the two front wheels would have had their axle going through a pair of boards the joined just under the cloth tape seat.

All Shaker furniture was sturdy and much of it was utilitarian, but they could be quite high art. Don't forget they largely peaked in the 1850-1900, so their furniture styles come from those days. Note they are not overly ostentatious, but that is often cited as a reason why they are still so popular. The forms are so simple, they could almost be mid-century modern sometimes.

Now of course since this particular Shaker Village was defunct for several decades before it was preserved most of these artifacts were carefully curated from donated collections later. But many of them came from the original community as they had not travelled too far. Many more were lost to collectors.

Some of their most popular forms were simple tables, chests and dressers. I had never seen the chest form above as Shaker.

Shakers were extremely practical. Often they built very simple cabinets into walls adjacent to certain tasks. They rarely wasted an opportunity to build a small closet into a wall if there was a small opening.

The tall dresser to the right is gigantic and was especially finely made. I have rarely seen Shaker furniture quite so tall.

Shakers often slept 2-3 to a room. But for 1850s, this was pretty luxury.

Shakers were very pragmatic and practical. They used many labor saving devises and were not afraid to modernize. The Shaker communities that survived into the 20th century used electricity and dressed modestly but more modernly. The object I took a photo above was a three-level clothes hangar to maximize space.

Shakers were also entrepreneurs and not afraid of color. If the customer wanted color, they had the ability to stain to the desired hue.

This particular desk is very common to the Shaker form of all of the Villages, but this one is slightly unique. This is an early piece made by one of the men who showed an interest in science - he was good enough to sign the underside of the piece.

Yes - Shakers did not have their own children, but they often fostered in the hopes they could entice younger generations to join. This young man still had to apprentice in the Village but asked to go to to school to learn medicine in the big city. He was encouraged and eventually returned to the village a certified Doctor and served as the Village Doctor until he retired in 1910. But he still had to learn all the normal Shaker duties before he left.

The Shakers were also capable of very fine furniture as evidenced by this Grandfather clock.

This writing desk was exceptional and the young Shaker man eventually left the Village to open his own fine furniture shop. He was good enough to sign the bottom of one of the drawers for provenance.

We were fortunate to depart Bloomington just before a large winter storm that raged all across the mid-west and dropped 1-5 inches all the way to the Carolinas.

We got about 4 inches in the fields at the Shaker Village but luckily the roads were warm enough that the snow on the pavement didn't start sticking until the end of the fall. But what a wonderful way to wake-up on the first day of your Spring Break Holiday. By mid-day the next day the snow was starting to melt from intense clear skies and sunshine.