Hancock Shaker Village, MA

The Shakers date back to 1747, to Manchester, England, and their original leader Ann Lee (1736–84), known as 'Mother Lee'. Due to their persecution in England, Lee decided to move the religious group – which believed in celibacy, pacifism, gender equality, and simple communal living – to America.

Hancock Shaker Village began in the late 1780s. By the mid-19th century the Shaker community had reached its peak of between 4000 to 5000 followers, of whom more than 300 lived in Hancock just a few miles from Pittsfield. In the early 1900s there were only about fifty mainly female members here, and the community ended in 1960.

This long view just gives an idea of the size of the place.

The huge Round Stone Barn that features on the village's advertising logo.

Not a barn but the Laundry and Machine Shop.

Inside the Machine Shop.

The Drying Room.

The huge Brick Dwelling where the Shakers lived from 1830 to 1959. As outside technology improved, so did the technology here.

'ALL PERSONS

ARE FORBID USING

TOBACCO

IN THIS HOUSE'

The following rules apply to visitors:

'At the table we wish all to be as free as at home, but we dislike the wasteful habit of leaving food on the plate. No vice is with us the less ridiculous for being in fashion.'

'Married Persons tarrying with us over night, are respectfully notified that each sex occupy separate sleeping apartments while they remain. This rule will not be departed from under any circumstances.'

Alcoholic drinks were allowed, and fruit wines and ciders were made here.

A view of the cellar.

During the summer and autumn food was preserved for the long winter.

Part of the dining room, where prayers were said before meals, which were eaten in silence.

The community was nevertheless hierarchical, and Deacons oversaw and supervised the work here. Some Deacons were responsible for work made for the outside world.

The Brethren's Shop.

Although the Shakers believed in gender equality and there were no strict rules about work roles, men and women nevertheless tended to fall into traditional gender work patterns, with the men doing the farming, woodwork, metalwork, stonework, etc, and the women the cooking.

Shakers sold brooms and brushes, and the invention of the flat broom is credited to a male Shaker.

Varnished or painted oval boxes were also a popular Shaker product.

Hired labor from outside was used as early as 1826 (for work on the Round Stone Barn), although the community suffered from a shortage of males from the latter half of the 19th century. Hired hands lodged here, away from the Brick Dwelling, and away from young girls in Shaker care.

'IN LOVING MEMORY

OF MEMBERS OF THE

SHAKER CHURCH

WHO DEDICATED THEIR LIVES

TO GOD AND TO THE GOOD OF

HUMANITY'

The Shaker cemetery is to the north-east of the village, and there are no individual graves.

Links to my Utopia posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Hancock Shaker Village, MA
Jean-Baptiste Godin and Utopia, Guise, Aisne (02)

Samuel Harrison in Pittsfield, MA

Samuel Harrison was born in 1818 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to slave parents who were freed three years later. He became a minister and lived at 82 Third Street in Pittsfield, a house which has been restored with a view to turn it into a museum.

Harrison published several works, among them An Appeal of a Colored Man to His Fellow-Citizens of a Fairer Hue, in the United States (1877), and Rev. Samuel Harrison: His Life Story, as Told by Himself (1899).

Harrison was buried in Pittsfield Cemetery:

'REV. SAMUEL HARRISON

April 15, 1818.

Aug. 11. 1900.'

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in Pittsfield, MA

Herman Melville is big in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he lived with his family in their home Arrowhead a few miles south of Pittsfield itself. This is now an author's home museum dedicated to Melville, who was here from 1850 to 1863 and wrote many of his famous works, including Moby-Dick. But no photography is allowed inside, which can put many people off.

In downtown Pittsfield there are two public sculptures dedicated to the creature.

Donna Dodson's is outside the Berkshire Athenaeum, and titled Moby Dick.

And this non-abstract sculpture is on the lower corner of Maplewood Avenue and North Street.

By C. R. Grey, this work is called The Great White Whale.

Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: New England Tour #19

Herman Melville (1819—91) married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, and in 1950 moved with his family to a farm in Pittsfield in the Berkshires, west Massachusetts, a town he was familar with through his uncle Thomas Melvill. He called it Arrowhead. He had had success with his novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which was very much inspired by his three-month stay on the Marquesas Islands after deserting the whaler Acushnet, on which he'd spent eighteen months in the early 1840s.

Melville began a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he'd met on Monument Mountain* and who lived a few miles away in Lenox. Melville spent his most productive writing years at Arrowhead. Here he wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), 'Bartleby the Scrivener' (1853), 'Benito Cereno' (1855), and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). And of course Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), which he dedicated to Hawthorne. He told his friend Evert A. Duyckinck in December 1850 that life in the country was like being at sea, and that he felt his writing room was a ship's cabin. Arriving very shortly after the season, I was unable to see and photograph his desk.
 

Unfortunately, Melville's work at Pittsfield was unsuccessful and The Confidence-Man was his last novel. The family returned to New York in 1863. Throughout his life his writings only brought him $10,000. Now, of course, he is recognized as a great writer, and Moby-Dick is generally thought of as one of the greatest American novels.

*William Cullen Bryant wrote the poem 'Monument Mountain' about the legend of the name, concerning the love of an Indian maid for her cousin, which disgusted her elders because they considered it incestuous. She retreated into herself, shunned company and threw herself to her death from the rocks. They buried her on the southern slope and left a simple monument: a cairn to which anyone passing would silently add.

Famously, on 5 August 1850 a group of literary people went for a picnic on Monument Mountain, among them Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James T. Fields, Annie Fields, and Evert A. Duyckinck. After climbing to the top, there was a reading of Bryant's poem, they had lunch in the rocks, and they drank a great deal. The event is commemorated every year by a climb up the mountain.