On Saturday, September 1, at 2 pm Shaker Museum President David Stocks will lead visitors on a tour of the North Family Waterworks, a marvel of architecture and ingenuity. This tour is free. Participants will meet at the North Family Granary.
The waterworks, which essentially “plumbed” the entire mountainside above the village to reservoirs, underground stone aqueducts, cisterns, waterwheels, dwellings, barns and so on, made possible the expansion of a mountain plateau with limited natural water sources into a village housing some 600 people and large agricultural and industrial operations. In 2009, the National Park Service conducted a summer-long study of the North Family landscape centered on this engineered system, carefully documenting the Shaker system. As today we are more and more interested in small-scale and sustainable energy sources, come see how the Shakers did it – “state of the art” some 150 years ago.