Doug Winiarski

It's not until Ann Lee dies in 1784 and then a group of her successors take over.

A man named Joseph Meacham, who's one of her first American converts, emerges as a leader of the Shaker movement around 1790.

And it's at that point that Shakerism

grows into what the tradition would call gospel order, in which they call that charisma of Anne Lee, and they give it institutional form.

So they do several things.

First, all of those disparate Shaker converts all over New England are gathered together in particular places that will become the nucleus of the first Shaker villages.

So that's Watervliet, New York, New Lebanon, and Hancock in western Massachusetts.

Harvard in central Massachusetts, and then several communities in Connecticut and New Hampshire and Maine.

Those become the beginnings of the first Shaker communities.

And part of gospel order means organizing Shaker converts into what they would call families.

A Shaker family is a group of, say, 25 to 50 or 75 men and women

many of whom have been previously married, who join Shaker communities and agree to live celibate lives as brothers and sisters.

So they will all work together, they'll own their own farm property, and they'll live together in a communal dormitory.

And then additional things, Shakers will begin to first begin to tell their histories, write down their theology.

They'll begin to regularize their worship practices by creating

Sort of clear forms of what the Shakers would call laboring, or what we would today call dancing, in which lines of Shakers would line up in their meeting houses, brothers and sisters opposite one another, in moving carefully choreographed motions to enact their sense of shaking off sin.

And they'll begin to write down and produce their own music.

You can see in all of these things, the shakers are beginning to organize and institutionalize.

So Shaker worship, as it takes form under Joseph Meacham in the years after Ann Lee passes away, takes place in very uniquely shaped buildings, Shaker meeting houses that look a lot different than other meeting houses of the time.

Unlike, say, a congregational meeting house in New England where the sermon, the minister's sermon, is the set piece and sometimes the Lord's Supper and sometimes baptism.