Doug Winiarski

But people will gather together in queues that are directionally oriented toward a pulpit with a sounding board.

The whole goal is to deliver the word of God to the congregation.

Yeah.

Shaker meeting houses are completely open spaces.

They have a unique trust system that runs through the rafters that allows the weight in the building to be distributed to the outside walls that creates a wide open, essentially like a ballroom, an open floor.

There'll be movable benches on the inside of a shaker meeting house that can be moved to the sides so that the shakers can gather together in separate groups of men and women and labor or dance and sing.

Shakers also do have sermons.

We might call them more like homilies in which one of the elders or eldresses might give a message.

But really, the central act of shaker worship in the 19th century was singing and dancing.

And by the way, they did all of this in front of tourists.

So there's a spectacle to shaker worship.

Every shaker meeting house has a set of benches or even risers around the outside where spectators can come and watch on the Sabbath.

The shakers engage in their public meetings and do their thing with worship and dance.

So that begins around 1790, give or take, depending upon the year, depending on the community.

But what it takes is for all of those Shaker converts to come together and sign a written covenant.

Forming a joint interest in which most of these are families, the original Shaker converts tend to be married husbands and wives, often with several children in tow, who convert to Shakerism.

And when they do so, they need to surrender their property to the community and sign the covenant and agree to live celibate lives as brothers and sisters and have their children raised communally by the village.

So that takes place around 1790 or so, and that creates the financial base for shaker communities, for example, at New Lebanon or Enfield, Connecticut or Harvard, Massachusetts, to purchase enough land to create large and prosperous communal villages.

Mm-hmm.

Shaker Village, in its ultimate form, will usually comprise something like between 3,000 and 5,000 acres of really good farmland.