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

XII. The Restoration Restored

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CHAPTER XII The Restoration Restored D espite his advanced age, Earl Wallace had continued his uninterrupted close supervision of the Pleasant Hill operation until the weekend he died. Just a few days earlier—proving that he did not always insist on adding property to the Shakertown holdings—he had closed his last deal, which involved the sale of 1,431 acres of farmland (given in the 1970s by Pansy Poe) and added $1 million to the village endowment, doubling it. Without Wallace, said Wilson Wyatt, “Shakertown wouldn’t exist.” “He was Shakertown,” added Philip Davidson. “Everybody understood that.” But, in fact, everybody did not understand it. The dissenters even included Shakertown’s president since 1975, Jim Thomas, who might well have agreed with the view that Wallace was Shakertown in earlier years but felt that during the latter 1980s the chairman had devoted excessive attention —and money—to the development of the Shakertown Roundtable, at the expense of day-to-day maintenance of the village and of needed updating of the infrastructure. Thomas even cited a somewhat less-than-glowing 1989 restaurant review in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Wallace was not “embarrassed” by problems with the physical plant and hence was disinclined to remedy them, according to Thomas; hence roofs, mechanical systems, and ventilating and other equipment of all kinds had deteriorated badly and even become obsolete in the 1980s. Made an ardent preservationist by his experience first in Louisville and then through 144 RESTORING SHAKERTOWN the years of close association with Jim Cogar at Pleasant Hill, Thomas concluded that Wallace had simply lost interest in the Shaker Village as an outdoor museum. “He disdained the use of the word ‘museum,’” Thomas recalled, “and prohibited the staff from using the word.” In moving the emphasis at the village to conferences, specifically the Roundtable,Thomas said, Wallace brushed aside the preservation and education advocates on the staff and grew testy with their pleas for support. He eliminated the funds for staffing the library, for acquiring primary and secondary source materials, and for periodicals, Thomas remembered. This unhappy time found Thomas and Ed Nickels, then the director of collections, using their own money to buy needed materials and memberships in professional organizations so that the library would receive their publications. Staff travel was eliminated from the budget, as the increasingly autocratic chairman ruled that staff members who attended professional meetings during the week, at their own expense, would lose vacation time. The last annual report on the village itself, Thomas noted, was written by Wallace in 1979. During the 1980s, the chairman focused on producing glossy reports about the Roundtable, a practice that was discontinued after Wallace’s death when Thomas reactivated the annual reports to include preservation and educational programs and progress in village activities . Although Wallace would not spend money on such items as Shaker furniture, Thomas finessed that obstacle in 1984 by winning a $250,000 grant from the James Graham Brown Foundation for furniture purposes. Also in the 1980s, despite Wallace’s cooling interest in scholarly conferences on preservation, Thomas convened and chaired meetings that brought to Pleasant Hill representatives from Old Sturbridge, Deerfield, and similar historic villages. Thomas left no doubt that in the conflict between those primarily interested in the historic legacy of the village itself and those who saw it just as much as a setting for a variety of educational and cultural activities, he gave preservation an emphatic Number One priority. Outside the Pleasant Hill circle during the 1980s, preservationists had taken a highly favorable view of Wallace’s performance. In 1985, at the age 145 The Restoration Restored of eighty-six, the chairman saw his efforts in behalf of Shakertown win recognition across the country as well as at home, as he received the medal for historic preservation from the Garden Clubs of America and the John Wesley Hunt award from the Blue Grass Trust. But behind the scenes at Pleasant Hill, the board of trustees had long harbored an anti-Wallace faction , or, at least, a group that only reluctantly acquiesced in the chairman’s direction of village affairs. Wallace had plenty of supporters, however, and his prestige remained enormous among people who could look back two decades and more to days when the fledgling Pleasant Hill project had been widely derided as “Wallace’s Folly.” Such factors, together with the chairman’s well-known...