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

Foreword: Rebirth of a Historic Community

Foreword Rebirth of a Historic Community THOMAS D. CLARK T ucked away safely atop a shoulder of the Kentucky River palisades, Shakertown at Pleasant Hill in Mercer County, Kentucky, near Lexington, is one of the best preserved and managed of the communal sites in North America. It is a national treasure—twenty-nine hundred acres of beautiful land and restored buildings that was once a thriving village created in the nineteenth century by believers of a curious religious sect committed to the practice of communal, but celibate, living.This book tells how the village was saved from the ravages of time and neglect and became an impressive landmark in the historic preservation movement of the second half of the twentieth century. But first, a word about the origin of the Pleasant Hill Shaker community . With more than a dash of folk wisdom and foresight, northern emissaries of the socio-religious mystic Mother Ann Lee came to Kentucky in search of converts two hundred years ago and located a modest beginning site on the winding Shawnee Run Creek, a lateral of the Kentucky River. By 1808 the village was moved up ridge to a knoll to be called Pleasant Hill. In a frenetic moment when Kentucky was aglow with religious revivalistic fervor, wandering Shaker proselytizers found it relatively easy to recruit members for their Society of Believers. At Pleasant Hill they planted vii
a self-sustaining religio-agrarian foothold. Well outside the pale of the religious fundamentalists, the discipline and order of Mother Ann was based upon a strong element of Quakerism, the Established Church of her native England, and a generous outpouring of mysticism. The order grew in numbers, to a zenith of five hundred in 1830, the third largest of the nineteen Shaker communities then in America. There came experienced farmers, herdsmen, craftsmen, food processors, and skilled marketers. Standing above the rank and file of converts was the gifted Virginia youth Micajah Burnett, a self-taught architect and builder who planned and oversaw the construction of a cluster of remarkable buildings of an adaptive Georgian style. No Kentucky builder ever used native Kentucky materials to so graceful a purpose. Burnett’s remains lie in an unmarked grave of the village where he labored, but his genius is remembered in the high degree of perpetuity he assured the structures at Pleasant Hill. Their craftsmen unable to compete against an expanding commercialindustrial economy, their beliefs undermined by a waning of religious enthusiasm and a weakening of their faith in celibacy as the nineteenth century moved forward, the Shakers slowly succumbed to the blight of worldliness in changing times. With the death of the last surviving Shaker, Sister Mary Settles, in 1923, the village was returned to “the world.” In recounting how Shakertown was reassembled as an outdoor museum in the second half of the last century, the largest restored Shaker community in the country, Thomas Parrish has presented a fascinating chronicle of the village’s evolving fortunes. He deals effectively with the challenges of financing, of finding the best preservation experts, and of following their advice to achieve the highest standards of authenticity possible . In terms of management, his story credits, properly, the enormous contribution of Earl D. Wallace, the longtime chairman of the restoration effort; but he also includes the criticisms of those who objected to what they saw as Wallace’s attempts in the last years of his leadership to move the mission from historic preservation to conferencing—primarily annual meetings on socioeconomic issues conducted by the Shakertown Roundtable—while ignoring suggestions for further work on the infrastructure at Shakertown. Toward the conclusion of this story, it will be apparent that Wallace’s successors as chairmen redirected the program, and viii FOREWORD substantial fund-raising, toward the preservation mission. But adherence to preservation as a central mission, however admirable, has not exempted Shakertown from a decline in visitor attendance that has been noted at historic sites all over the United States in the first decade of a new century. I would suggest that Shakertown trustees may want to revisit mission issues yet again. Personally, I saw Shakertown for the first time in mid-summer, 1929. It stood as a proud but sadly deteriorating roadside Kentucky settlement, and seemed to be growing shabbier daily. Over the next three decades restoration was only a vapid dream of a few concerned individuals. When Wallace came along, as a retired oil...