Doug Winiarski

It'll be divided between several different Shaker families, depending upon the size of the community.

Each family, as we were saying before, maybe about 100 to sometimes 200 people.

Those families are ranked in terms of their religious experience.

So there'll be a novitiate order, a gathering order for new converts to kind of learn Shaker ways.

And then as your life as a Shaker continues, you might move into...

the second family or a directional family, the East family or the West family on a piece of the property.

And eventually by the time you reach your mature life as a shaker, you'll be living at the center of the village and what's often called the first family or the church family or the center family.

And so that's how kind of Shakers were organized.

And each of these families will have its own farmland.

They'll have their own herds of livestock and horses and sheep.

They'll have their own mill complexes.

Shaker villages in the 19th century, especially before the American Civil War, are very, very prosperous places.

They have some of the highest standards of living of anywhere in the new United States.

Lots of food, lots of technology.

Shakers are not like the Amish.

They are very pro-technology.

And there's a lot of stories about shakers and their ingenuity that supposedly developed the clothespin and the circular saw.

But for farm families in early 19th century America, you sort of calculated your weight on the size of the barn on your farm.

And you can imagine for a society of sometimes 100 to 500 people, shaker grapes.

barns, many of which survive today at various Shaker museums around the country, were some of the largest and most technologically sophisticated agricultural buildings in the country at the time.