A religion that built things so well the things outlived the religion. Nineteen villages between New York and Kentucky. The flat broom, the circular saw, the packaged seed, the round stone barn, the ladderback chair, and "Simple Gifts" — all came out of the same theology of work. The Society is functionally extinct. The work is at the Met.
Ann Lee was the unschooled daughter of a Manchester blacksmith. She joined the Wardley sect — Quakers who shook, shouted, and spoke in tongues — around 1758, was repeatedly imprisoned for disrupting Anglican services, and in 1774 sailed with eight followers for colonial New York. They cleared land at Niskayuna, north of Albany, the year after the Boston Tea Party. The Society of Believers had eight members on a continent that did not yet exist as a country.
By her death in 1784, the community had survived. By 1840, there were nineteen villages and roughly six thousand members from Maine to Kentucky. The Society's terms were severe: celibacy for all members, communal property, full equality between women and men in a country that did not allow women to own land, public confession of sins, separation from "the world." Children entered through the orphanage system or with parents who joined as a household. Once admitted, the world outside ended.
What replaced the world was a discipline of work. Hands to work, hearts to God — Mother Ann's phrase, the Society's working motto for two and a half centuries.
Decoration was a theological problem. Pride was vanity. Vanity was sin. A flourish on a chair leg was, in the Society's reading of the gospels, a small idolatry — energy spent on the self instead of on the work. The chair had to do the work of being a chair as well as a chair could be made to do it, and no more.
"Whatever is fashioned, let it be plain and simple, of good and substantial quality, unembellished by any superfluities, which add nothing to its goodness or durability."
The result was an aesthetic that read as radical austerity from outside the Society and as ordinary correctness from inside it. No carved finials. No turned ornaments. No paint where paint was not protective. Symmetry where symmetry was structural. The famous peg rail ran chair-high on every wall of every dwelling: chairs were hung from it when not in use so the floor could be swept; cloaks, brooms, candle sconces, bonnets — everything that would otherwise sit on furniture went on the rail. The room emptied. The room cleaned. The room could fill with thirty Sisters in unison movement on Sunday and with the work of weaving on Monday and not be reorganised between.
The work itself produced, almost incidentally, a cascade of inventions. The flat broom (Theodore Bates, Watervliet, 1798) replaced the round besom in American kitchens within a generation. The circular saw is attributed — disputed but persistently — to Tabitha Babbitt at Harvard Shaker Village around 1813. The Society was the first in America to package and sell garden seeds, beginning in the 1790s; the herb industry that followed at New Lebanon was the country's first commercial pharmaceutical operation. The Shakers did not patent any of it. Patents were considered a form of personal claim on collective work.
The Society made things to last. The things lasted longer than the Society. The Met has a room of Shaker furniture in its American Wing. Appalachian Spring is on every American symphony's repertoire. Pleasant Hill is a museum. Sabbathday Lake has, as of 2024, two members.
The lesson is not that the religion failed. It is that the work the religion produced was so completely itself — so unwilling to perform anything other than its own usefulness — that it could survive the institution that made it. Form outlasts faith.
Project Lavos's interest in the Shakers is the same as its interest in Bossa Nova, the foxglove, the Brutalist slab, the Swiss grid, and the working pipeline that fills the Bauhaus inventory: a discipline that did the work as well as the work could be done, and let the world catch up at its own pace.