Events of Tuesday, October 5, 2010 

          This morning we woke up peacefully, blissfully, contentedly, from our restful night in the darkest corner of a Costco parking lot. We made beds, dressed, and had breakfast, with the first six of the set of eighteen yogurts we had purchased at Costco yesterday, which were delicious and amazing. After breakfast, we drove to the Walmart we had visited yesterday (which was in Massachusetts!) and returned a futile tension rod. Then we were on the road again!

          We drove to the Canterbury Shaker Village. We had been looking forward to this supposedly awesome Shaker experience since Mom had first read about it in the AAA Tour Book and shared the captivating and intriguing description with us. So when we arrived we strode into the visitor’s center and bought the family admission deal.

          The first thing we did was explore the gift shop, which was odd because usually we save that for last and only then if we have time. But my parents recognized that this gift shop was remarkable and should be explored in the greatest detail. There were many handmade items of the Shaker quality and style, all of which were beautiful, useful and, sadly, expensive. A Shaker specialty, as we learned, is the gorgeous wooden oval-shaped box, some with handles, some without, some with box tops, and others without. They are the Shakers’ Tupperware or cup holders – the “everything” containers. These special treasures were sold in the gift shop in many varieties – all different colors, as well as many different types of wood, sizes, and prices. The smallest boxes, which would not fit much more than a few nails or hairpins, cost over twenty dollars, even with a thirty-percent-off sale.

          After exploring the gift shop for quite awhile, we wandered downstairs and watched part of the fifty-minute video about the Shakers, featuring Ken Burns as the narrator. When the time came for our tour, we left the makeshift theater and climbed back up the stairs to take the Shaker Story Tour. Outside, we met our tour guide, a jolly little white-haired lady named Mary. She was so sweet and happy and excited to share with us all that she knew about the Shakers and their lives there. She made me miss my grandparents exceedingly.

          Our tour began on the Meeting House Walk, betwixt two gorgeous rows of tall old maple trees with leaves of all beautiful shades of greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. There, we talked about the beginnings and the philosophy of the Shakers. Though they began at a Quaker meeting in Manchester, England, the group came to the United States in 1774, seeking religious freedom after having been persecuted in England. They formed nineteen different communities from Maine to Kentucky and everywhere in between. In this particular village’s heyday, however, over three hundred Shakers lived, worked, and worshipped in the village. As for the mighty maples surrounding us, we were informed that each new child brought to the Shaker village to be raised was given a maple tree to water and care for and look after, which was a form of discipline, in a way. However, it was also a way to bring each child further into the community with the sense of responsibility that comes with caring for something alive.

          The name “Shaker” derived from the original derogatory nickname, “the Shaking Quakers”, because of the ecstatic dancing that took place during church services. Our second stop of the tour was the meeting house, the first building built on the village grounds. We walked on the original floor (from 1792!) and learned that the Shakers loved to have wooden pegs in a row all the way around the interior of the building, because they were good for hanging anything – hats, coats, even furniture! We also saw evidence of the Shakers’ love of inventions that saved time, because “time is a gift from God” and should therefore be spent as wisely as possible. They had electricity and flush toilets and hot and cold running water before even the governor’s mansion in Concord had those luxuries. We saw the chandeliers they had installed in their meetinghouse, as well as the electricity that the Brothers had installed themselves, using the “knob-and-tube” method. Then we discussed their worship services and discovered that they reviewed their rules every ten years and changed or got rid of the rules that no longer make sense.

          Our next stop was the Laundry House, in which we saw the true evidence of the Shakers’ embrace of modern technology. They had large wooden laundry bins, divided and labeled to make sorting easier, and gigantic rotating wash bins that looked like huge barrels turned on their sides. We also saw Shaker-invented extractors (for the spinning part of the wash cycle, to extract the water). All these machines were run by a complex system of belts. To dry the clothes they used a pulley system to lift the wet clothes to the third floor where they had a huge drying machine. This machine was a system of twenty-foot-long rolling racks that they could slide out into the room and hang the clothes and slide back into place. When the ten parallel racks were full, a giant water steamer underneath heated the clothes, like our dryers today, and the clothes would be dry in about two hours.

          Then we continued on to the Schoolhouse, where we got to sit in the old-fashioned desks and learn a history lesson from the various maps about the one-room schoolhouse. Written on the blackboards, in the handwriting of the last living Eldress, were several Shaker saying. We were encouraged to tour the adjacent room, which was a three-hole outhouse! Our tour guide, who personally knew the last living Shaker of the community, shared with us some of her stories. This last Shaker asked if she was sad to have the community end, but she wasn’t because she felt it continued in those of us who came to learn about the Shaker society and take some of it with us when we left. Therefore, it would never really end. On that note, we concluded our tour.

          After our first tour, we visited the live demonstrations, the first of which was letterpress printing. We saw how the Shakers printed everything they needed printed, from notices to books to newspapers, when the village was at its peak. The printer showed us how each item to be printed must be assembled together by hand, and how the machinery that did the printing itself worked. Then he took us over to the cases of letters and showed us that the small letters were kept in the lower case, and the big letters were kept in the upper cases – hence the names UPPERCASE and lowercase. He also gave us a great word for Scrabble – “quoin”, which is part of the blocking system used to set up the type.

          Next, we visited the oval box maker. We discovered that the Shakers learned how to make these boxes from the Native Americans. Our demonstrator shared that he can make seven boxes in about six hours, so it takes him about forty five minutes just to make one little box. First, he soaks the wood for a very long time in boiling water until it is soft and malleable. Then he bends the wood into an oval and then nails down the “fingers” with the tiniest little nails I have ever seen. Fascinated, we watched as he hammered in the shiny golden spikes to hold down the fingers, and, in doing this, hold the box together. We watched him fashion the lid and then he explained how the top and bottom were put on the box. He confessed that he does not possess the “perfection” of the Shakers who would make everything a perfect fit with no gaps. They used wooden pegs to attach the bottoms and the tops. The wooden pegs he uses are just for show. To secure everything, he uses glue, and “cheats” a little by using sawdust to fill in where there are gaps.  

          After the live demonstrations, we experienced the Shaker Home Tour. Here we toured their dwelling house, beginning in the chapel attached to the dwelling house. There, the Shakers presented plays and held worship services when a trek to the original meeting house was not possible because of the snow. Our tour guide, Jessica, made our experience more realistic by separating “brothers” (boys) from “sisters” (girls) when we sat in the chapel. You see, the Shakers practiced celibacy, and they tried to avoid allowing temptation whenever possible. Then we went up separate staircases and viewed the Shakers’ actual bedrooms, which they called “retiring rooms”. They were basically just simplified college dormitories, full of rope beds and lumpy straw ticks. However, the “sister side” was a bit more modern because when the last few Shakers lived there, they were all Shaker sisters, and they got a little looser on the rules. Almost any change was good change.

          Then our tour guide showed us Room 8, where they stored all their off-season clothing and linens, with something like sixteen walk-in closets, each with forty cupboards, and a hundred-and-something drawers. It was all made from pine, and it was absolutely gorgeous. I was in organizational heaven. They had assigned each building letter and in each building there were numbered rooms and numbered drawers, and everything was symmetrical and everything had its place. Then the tour guide told us how the Shakers’ work was their prayer, which was why everything had to be so perfect, because it was a form of worship to God. A frequently quoted Shaker saying is “Hands to Work, Hearts to God”. Maybe this is why their work was so impressive.

          Our tour proceeded to the comfort and waiting rooms, a set for each gender. The Shakers’ lives were ruled by the bell, when to get up (4:30 am in summer/5:30 am in winter), when to eat, when to gather, when to work and when to pray. The comfort rooms were the bathrooms, with hot and cold running water. After getting ready for the day, the brothers and sisters just chilled in the waiting rooms until they were called to the dining hall. In later years, our tour guide told us, the waiting rooms became more like a parlor or hang-out place, when they weren’t working.

          Then we saw an eldress’s room, an elder’s room, and the library. The elders and eldresses were a step up in the hierarchy, so they got their own rooms and more luxuries. The Shakers had equality and duality in their lives pertaining to the sexes, because of their practice of celibacy. Everything the brothers had, the sisters had, and vice versa. The entire village was essentially symmetrical, one side for the boys and the other for the girls. They called themselves the monks and nuns without walls. They believed that if a wall divided the male side from the female side, they could not be equal, therefore disrupting their sense of community.

          So after our second guided tour, we decided to take a self-guided tour of the place, during which we visited the Sisters’ Shop and the North Shop, where they dealt with textiles, and the Creamery, where we viewed a touching video “Growing Up Shaker”, an interview of the last girl to be raised by the sisters, now a pleasant elderly lady. Then we toured the bake room, the carpenters’ shop, and the dining room. In each place we saw, some awesome time-saving contraption amazed me. The Shakers were ingenious to say the least! Everything had a purpose and was where it was because it was most convenient and efficient there. I felt quite at home in that aspect of things.

          At last the time came for us to leave, so we loaded up into Harvey and drove toward the exit. Ben yelled, “Mommy! Stop! We’re two inches from a rock!” It was at this point that we realized this exit was not going to work for us, as it was lined with tall and wide granite on both sides, not wide enough for us to make it through. We backed up, did a neat donut in the parking lot, and then went out the entrance. We then drove to our campsite in Loudon, New Hampshire, and had dinner, finishing off Grandpa’s delicious chocolate cake for dessert. Happy Belated Birthday, Grandpa!

          After dinner, we readied ourselves for bed and watched “Finding Nemo” on our itty bitty 11 ½-inch by 8 ½-inch TV screen, with giant surround sound. It was great fun, and a fantastic way to end a fantastic day!