Why The Society Was Created

The first Shakers arrived in America on the eve of the Revolution, having left England in pursuit of religious freedom. They became an order in 1787, the same year Shaker women were officially given equal rights, as well as the year the Constitution was signed and went into effect. In 1817 the Shakers’ southern societies freed their slaves and  began buying black believers out of slavery. The Shakers are one of the most interesting socio-religious movements in American history. They are also one of the longest lived, and are considered by many to be the most successful of the hundreds of communal groups and utopian societies that have flourished in this country since before the Revolutionary War. At their height in 1840 more than six thousand believers lived in nineteen communal villages in the states of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.  Tales of their peaceful and prosperous lives impressed the world’s utopians, but their religious experiment has all but died out by 1940 due to celibacy’s toll. Today, just a few Shakers still live at the community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.