“Leap and Shout, Ye Living Building!”: Ritual Performance and Architectural Collaboration in Early Shaker Meetinghouses

On quiet Sunday mornings in rural Maine, a small group of Shakers still gathers in the sturdy timber-framed meetinghouse at Sabbathday Lake to celebrate their spiritual gifts and lead communal singing. The group hosts friends from the area for shared worship in their village community, as they have done since the eighteenth century. Their remarkably preserved 1794 meetinghouse—like others designed and built by the early Shakers across the region—has been not only a passive, venerable witness to the long arc of Shaker history but also a ritual participant, shaping movement and song into exuberant millennial praise (Figure 1).¹

Figure 1.

Shaker 1794 meetinghouse, Sabbathday Lake, Maine. This meetinghouse was the last of the eighteenth-century Shaker meetinghouses built. An exterior stair hall was added in the nineteenth century, replacing interior stairs and gable-end doors.

Photograph by the author.

In the late eighteenth century, the Maine Shakers were the easternmost outpost of a centralized network of neatly ordered rural villages scattered from the Hudson River Valley to the Maine woods. Led to America by mystical leader “Mother” Ann Lee, the small band of zealous dissenters from Manchester, England, settled in the late 1770s on wooded farmland a few miles north of Albany, New York, in a place later known as Watervliet.² In the early 1780s, during a two-year missionary journey characterized by apocalyptic exhortations and ecstatic dancing, the itinerant group meandered among the frontier farms and villages of central New England. Attracting large crowds to their intense and curious worship, the Shakers made many converts, leaving small pockets of “Believers” in their wake across the region.³ The early groups prospered and by 1795 had consolidated into eleven villages in rural areas of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine (Figure 2). Each village was organized around a Shaker-built meetinghouse that embodied Shaker beliefs in material form and staged the experiential qualities of their novel worship and intricate ritual practices.⁴

Shaker life was carefully structured around an unusual set of practices that included celibacy, communal living, confession, gender equality, common property, and celebratory dance worship, all of which aimed to create a heaven-like society where perfection was possible. Importantly, the Shaker faith emphasized the second appearance of Christ was at hand and within them spiritually as the only true church. Shaker landscapes and building interiors expressed extreme order and neatness, a well-known attribute designed to stress that Shaker villages were an earthly analog to the divine order of heaven. Prominent fences marked them as separate from the world. Strictly gendered spaces throughout the village and during communal worship ritual in particular symbolized Shaker “regeneration” in the perfected status to which they aspired. The Shakers positioned themselves as the beginning of the long-prophesized New Millennium and through dramatic group dancing stressed the celebration of that inspired spiritual presence among them and their desire to “travel” forward in spiritual maturity.⁵ While scholars have investigated Shaker history, economics, religion, music, and material production (including tools, drawings, textiles, buildings, and furniture in particular), this study examines the intersection of architecture and religion—specifically, the role of architecture in shaping Shaker ritual and spiritual identity, with a focus on the Shakers’ formative years in the late eighteenth century.⁶

Mother Ann’s death in 1784 brought James Whittaker, the Shakers’ English missionary preacher, to leadership. Whittaker traveled extensively, visiting the early groups and encouraging their growth. Under his short tenure, the Shakers built the first framed meetinghouse near New Lebanon, New York, along the Massachusetts border, in 1785, and other meetinghouses followed.⁷ Joseph Meacham, a local Baptist revival leader, joined the Shakers in 1780 along with many of his followers, forming an early group of American converts near New Lebanon. At Whittaker’s death in 1787, Meacham became the first American-born Shaker leader, and New Lebanon village, better known as Mount Lebanon, soon assumed central authority over the Shaker domain.⁸ Meacham formally organized, consolidated, and centralized the fledgling communities, and...