How It All Started

Mother Ann Lee

The Shaker religion was founded by Ann Lee (1736-1784), an illiterate blacksmith’s daughter, in Manchester, England who was baptized and married in the Church of England. After an unfulfilling marriage and at least four miscarriages and four unsuccessful childbirths, she was imprisoned for disrupting Anglican Church services. During her imprisonment she experienced a series of visions, in which she was enlightened, that  sexual activity was the root of all sins; that she herself was Christ's Second Coming; and that it was her duty to carry the God's word to the New World. Ann Lee threw herself into her religion, and developed a group called the United Society of Believers in the Second Appearing of Christ who saw religion and life as a duality with a male and female counterpart.  She spent fifteen years with the sect, before, facing religious persecution, upon which  Mother Ann and her followers left England iin 1774 when she received a vision from God in which she was told that "a place had been prepared" for them in America.Here, she settled down in New York.