Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village. View from the North West, West Gloucester, ME.
The
Distinctiveness of Shaker Architecture by Robert P. EmlenOriginally published as the foreword in: The Architecture of the Shakers by Julie Nicoletta. Photography by Bret Morgan. Publisher Countryman Press, 1995.
ONE SUMMER DAY YEARS AGO I was driving the back roads of Maine with the
guidebook on the dashboard, looking for the Shaker village at Sabbathday Lake.
As I passed by the clapboarded frame farmhouses and connected barns of
Cumberland County, I wondered if these plain structures might be part of the
Shaker village. "Nope," said the woman at a little country store where I
stopped to ask the way. "Just up the road. You'll know it when you see it."
I wasn't so sure. What made the store keeper think I would recognize a
place I had never been? Over the years, I had driven many a mile on several
continents admiring all sorts of architecture. In graduate school, I had
memorized the styles of American buildings for slide exams. Still, I had no
mental image of a Shaker village. I wondered if I might drive right past this
one without knowing it. And then, as I came over the hill, flanking the road
before me was a compact and tidy village of substantial buildings. Although
they generally resembled those I had passed on the farms and in the towns down
the road, this place was clearly different. I knew that I had arrived in a
Shaker village.
My memories of that first visit to Sabbathday Lake bring to mind the
words of nineteenth-century travelers who recorded their initial impressions of
Shaker villages. Invariably, their accounts remark on the distinctive
appearance of the settlements: the number and quality of the buildings, the
neat and clean look of the landscape, the air of prosperity about the
community, the sense that Shaker villages are unmistakably different from the
homes of their rural neighbors. The broad styles of Shaker architecture are not
unique, nor are their building materials, nor their ways of working wood and
cutting stone and forging metal. The real difference lies in how Shakers live
their lives - and the homes they made for themselves reflect that
distinctiveness.
To begin with , Shakers lived communally, and to this end, they created
entire villages large enough to support hundreds of souls joined in a common
purpose of work and worship. This unified sense of purpose guided them as they
shaped their environment. The Shakers controlled enough land to level
hillsides, redirect stream beds, and plow the soil into large contiguous, even
fields. Moreover, they could marshal the labor to do it. Even the biggest and
most prosperous farm families of early nineteenth-century America didn't
operate on this scale.
The unusual prospect of the Shaker landscape makes just as clear an
impression on visitors today as it did over a century ago. Those early visitors
marveled at the architecture of individual buildings, often noting design
solutions the Shakers devised in response to the requirements of communal
living. Dwellings for a hundred of the faithful could be so large - often the
biggest buildings in the surrounding countryside - that Shaker craftsmen had to
address the problems of the sheer size of their structures. They introduced
interior windows, for instance , to carry daylight from exterior walls through
rooms and into the darkest corners of the attics. Meeting house roofs had to be
self-supporting their interiors uninterrupted by column or partitions, to allow
the unencumbered movement of religious dance. Buildings used jointly by
brethren and sisters were designed with parallel, exclusive facilities -
duplicate doorways and duplicate stairways.
Early visitors reported their fascination with innovative storage
systems, efficient barns, or cleverly designed laundry facilities. Clearly, the
form of Shaker architecture followed the function of life in the spiritual
community. Whether or not we have tried to analyze it, most visitors to these
villages over the last two centuries have sensed the special quality of Shaker
architecture.
The Shakers were seldom victims of fashion. Their buildings bespeak
forthright, contemplative lives, freed from the influences of the outside
world. Stylistic considerations were not high on the list of Shaker priorities;
to the contrary buildings were designed to outlast the vagaries of changing
tastes. They had to be efficient, easy to maintain, and give their builders a
sense of serenity and grace from knowing that what they created was as close to
perfection as humanly possible.
Nineteenth-century visitors wrote of the unity of design in Shaker
villages. Developed according to the community's standards and requirements,
the buildings in a Shaker village are more consistent in appearance than those
of the neighboring farms. Their clustering on the land, the way they relate to
one another in function and scale, the consistency of aesthetic choices
employed by Shaker craftsmen, all attest to that communal society of spiritual
brethren and sisters devoted to creating an ideal life on earth.
This way of life distinguished Shaker architecture from the architecture
of other communal villages. Nowhere is the difference more obvious than in the
present appearance of former Shaker villages adapted in the twentieth century
as resorts, prisons, nursing homes, and seminaries. Although they still support
communal living, these villages have been modified to serve needs unknown to
the Shakers. One finds there only the vestiges of Shaker architecture.
The appearance of the village at Sabbathday Lake must have been distinctive in the mind of the storekeeper. It was settled by the Shakers in 1794 and has been home to the community for more than two hundred years. Small wonder I could recognize those buildings at first sight.
Copyright
1995 by Robert P. Emlen
For more information on the book Shaker Architecture click on the book cover.
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