Complicated Gifts

In the 1980s, commenting on widespread interest in Shaker-made furniture, Sister Mildred Barker, spokeswoman for the sect’s last surviving community, quipped, “I almost expect to be remembered as a chair or a table.” Sister Mildred, who died in 1990 at age 92, belonged to Maine’s Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, the oldest continuously surviving religious communities in the United States.

Shakerism was the most successful and enduring of many social experiments that flourished in 19th century America. A sect of radical mystics from England seeking to emulate Christ, the Shakers crossed the Atlantic to flee “the evils of the World.” In America, they lived communally in self-sustaining villages, practicing gender and racial equality and humane treatment of animals. Shakers freed slaves, raised orphans, and cared for the infirm. Throughout the sect’s history a demand that members forswear sex has made the Shakers both notorious and rare. For more than a century, their calling card in the larger culture has been appreciation for the things they made, exemplified by oval bentwood containers called Shaker boxes. Shakers are scarce—as of publication, two remained. However, the Shaker legacy still exerts incalculable influence, and the sect has outlived more than one party who predicted its extinction.

Coffee table books and museum catalogs illustrate and explain Shakerism—an irony, since the faith’s founder, Ann Lee, an illiterate, eschewed written interpretation of her sect’s beliefs. The material world held little interest for the working-class prophetess, and one of the faith’s strongest principles is the relinquishing of personal possessions. Meanwhile, huge sums now go to purchase original chairs, candle stands, cupboards, and other handmade objects that have come to represent “Shaker” as an