Restoring Shakertown: The Struggle to Save the Historic Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

I. “That Wonderful Village”

1 “That Wonderful Village” 1
CHAPTER I “That Wonderful Village” B ack in the 1950s, Jimmie Campbell, an engineering student at the University of Kentucky, used to drive regularly from Lexington down U.S. Highway 68 to visit his sister in Danville. He became thoroughly acquainted on these trips with every curve on that narrow road, including the series of tight turns dropping down to the Kentucky River at the Jessamine-Mercer county line and its counterpart series across the river, climbing up again and onto the rolling Mercer County plateau. A few miles farther on from the river, Campbell would come to a special landmark on his forty-mile drive—a low stone fence, in need of some repairs but distinctive nevertheless, that marked the beginning of the lands surrounding the most unusual village in the entire Central Kentucky area— the old settlement called Shakertown, after the members of the remarkable religious sect that had established it early in the nineteenth century. A 1904 guidebook to the Bluegrass spoke of the village as “the home of the most peculiar people on the face of the globe.” Approaching the village itself, young Campbell would pass a large square building on his left that seemed to be serving as a silo, stuffed with hay. Then, knowing the road, he would slow down a bit because a sharp curve would put him right in the village. Driving past several big brick and stone buildings—“all of them looked like boxes”—he would pass, on the left, one that was used as an inn. He never stopped there. Although he went on 2 RESTORING SHAKERTOWN to have a distinguished career as a civil servant in Lexington (including, on his retirement, having a street named after him), his budget in those days had little room, he said, for eating at restaurants. For Campbell, Shakertown was, at best, a place to get an occasional few gallons of gas at the little Shell station. Apparently he missed quite a dining adventure; another visitor to Shakertown in that era enjoyed better luck. Dick DeCamp, who spent a good bit of time in Lexington in the late 1950s and moved to the city in 1960, recalled that he and his friends “all used to go down to Shakertown and eat when the Renfrews ran the restaurant. The place had a lot of character . It was like something out of a Faulkner novel, going there for dinner. They just had some tables around and the old shades were on the windows .” It was a bring-your-own-bottle operation, DeCamp said, and the food was wonderful. “They just had a few things—a special eggplant casserole and fried chicken and old ham, but they’d never get it ready.” Guests would sit out on the front steps and “kill a bottle of whiskey,” and finally a member of the party would stroll back into the kitchen and casually ask, “How’re things coming, Mrs. Renfrew?” The lady would look up at her interlocutor from her cup of tea, “but it wasn’t tea.” Finally everybody would get fed, and then somebody would wind up the old Victrola in the corner and put on a record, and sometimes a waitress would join in the dancing.Those who, like Jimmie Campbell, just drove through Shakertown had no idea of the delights they were missing. DeCamp also remembered the filling station, with its old-style pumps out front. It was in one of the larger old buildings that also housed a country store. A frame building along the street, between the inn and the general store, bore the sign: SHAKERTOWN BAPTIST CHURCH. One of the buildings was painted “a hideous brown,” one observer said, and a number of the others were covered with fake red brick paper. Some of them had porches and lean-tos that obviously had been added long after the original construction . Old cars sprawled outside a repair shop, and the Shaker graveyard presented a thicket of cane and brush. Banks of wires stretched between utility poles, and advertising signs hung from some of the buildings. The village of Shakertown may have had its gustatory charms, but all in all, as one woman said, “it was not much of an inspiring sight.” Looking 3 “That Wonderful Village” at it in 1959 or 1960, you seemed to see just another Waco, as in Madison County, or Little Rock...