by David Flint
Work is progressing on the creation of a marvelous heritage tourism destination at the Shaker Village in New Lebanon. David Stocks, President of the Shaker Museum and Library, currently based in Old Chatham, recently intrigued members and guests of the Stephentown Historical Society with his presentation about the ingenious Shakers and ongoing plans to relocate the Museum and Library to a restored North Family area of the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village.
In the process, the Museum and Library will be reinvented. It’s a challenge, Stocks said, to re-create a museum so that it is relevant to today’s culture. One has to rethink what a museum is and how one reaches today’s young people in a meaningful way. “Mount Lebanon was and is a living community,” he said, “and we will add to that.”
Stocks told something of the history of the Museum and Library. It was founded in 1950 by John Williams at his farm in Old Chatham. A collector of old tools, he heard that the Shakers were getting rid of stuff from the old stone barn at Mt. Lebanon. Eventually, working with surviving Shakers at the Hancock Shaker Village and in New Hampshire and Maine, he amassed the largest collection of Shaker artifacts and documents in the world, with about 80% of it coming from Mt. Lebanon.
The Shakers were not just furniture people, Stocks said. They were ingenious in many ways, and they used everything well. Believing that the second coming of Christ had been accomplished in the person of Ann Lee, they now set themselves the task to make the world perfect. They tried to be perfect in everything they did. It was not a drab life. Singing and dancing was an integral part of their religious celebrations. And color was most important in all their works. Shaker textiles for example are filled with color and include knitted rugs, articles of clothing of all kinds, fox lined gloves and gloves knitted from raccoon fur.
The Shakers also established a number of thriving businesses including the commercial sale of packaged seeds and medicines, the latter developed largely from herbs found in a great 500-acre swamp in New Lebanon. They learned the art of herbal medicine from Native Americans and then passed it on to the Tildens of New Lebanon who went on to establish their own thriving medicinal business.
Following a very extensive feasibility study commissioned by the Museum for which a Save America’s Treasures grant was received in 2001, the Shaker Museum and Library in 2004 acquired the North Family parcel at Mt. Lebanon Shaker Village. “It all started at Mt. Lebanon,” Stocks said. It was the “Vatican” of the Shaker movement and the largest and most successful of the Shaker communities. Mount Lebanon was named a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and has been recognized by the World Monuments Fund as one of the 100 most significant endangered historic sites in the world. Settled in 1787, by the 1840s there were eight “family” groupings there, some 600 people with 150 buildings extending over 6,000 acres. The Church and Center Family areas are now inhabited by the Darrow School. The South Family area now houses the Abode of the Message Sufi Community and the Mountain Road School, and the Berkshire Farm occupies the lower end of the original Shaker property.
The North Family was designated to be sort of a missionary family. Their religious dance and singing sessions were open to the public as a means of attracting new members. The Shaker Museum has pledged to restore and preserve the buildings and landscape and add new facilities to make it the future site of the Museum and Library. As Stocks put it, “We will put most of the objects back where they came from.” It consists of ten buildings on 30 acres just off of Route 20.
The first building you come to is the impressive remains of the great Stone Barn. It was gutted by fire in 1972 but the massive stone walls still stand. Under way is a $2 million project to stabilize the walls. Consideration was given earlier to constructing the new museum in the Stone Barn, but Stocks said that the estimated $50 million cost of such a project was deemed to be too much.
Instead the Museum’s leadership has committed to constructing new facilities at North Family to house and conserve their collection. Ten to fifteen thousand square feet of space will be needed for warehousing, exhibits, archives and a visitor center. Other buildings that have been restored or are undergoing restoration include the Wash House that was used as both a laundry and for drying fruits and vegetables, the Granary built in 1838 to store and mix grains and the Brethren’s Workshop built in 1829.
The Shakers at Mt. Lebanon created a very extensive and ingenious water power system consisting of a complex of reservoirs, streams and aqueducts. The system was well documented last year by the National Park Service as part of an Historic American Landscapes Survey. Stocks said the flood of 2009 caused a lot of damage to the aqueduct system which he hoped to find, somehow, the means to have repaired.
This past week Stocks announced receipt of several preservation grants that will help to restore both the Brethren’s Workshop and the damaged water system. The first is a $300,000 grant from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund to preserve the Brethren’s Workshop, the center of the Shakers’ industrial complex. These funds can also be used to redirect storm waters that have overloaded and damaged the water system and threatened the Workshop. Another grant in the amount of $100,000 from an anonymous donor will be used to extend a Preservation Carpentry Internship program. Interns in this program have done a significant amount of restoration work in both the Granary and the Brethren’s Workshop. The grant will enable continued restoration of the Workshop. A third grant of $2,750 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation has also been obtained for the purpose of repairing and preserving the water power system.
During the transition period of the phased move to Mt. Lebanon, the Old Chatham Museum galleries are not open to the public. In the past year the Museum has conducted a number of programs and events at Mt. Lebanon. In the meantime, Stocks refers those who are interested to the Museum’s website at shakermuseumandlibrary.org and to Google Earth. If you go to Mt. Lebanon Shaker Village on Google Earth you can click on any of the ten buildings in North Family and the name and description of the building will pop up along with links to historic photos in the Library of Congress’ Historic American Buildings Survey and links to images and 3D rotatable views of the buildings that have been uploaded to the National Parks Service’s Heritage Documentation Programs.
