New Hampshire: Canterbury Shaker Village

🍂 A Little Detour: The Shaker Village, Canterbury, New Hampshire

We have always had a soft spot for Shaker crafts — the furniture especially, with its clean lines and stubborn refusal to be anything other than exactly what it is, and their textiles too, which have a quiet dignity about them that most modern design can only dream of. So when we were making our way through New England, we decided to peel off the main road and make a slight detour to the Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Well, it would have been rude not to.

The drive from Interstate 93 was rather lovely, as it happens — a narrow, winding road that curled through the trees, which were putting on quite a show in their full autumn colours. Russets, golds, deep crimsons. The tree line broke occasionally to reveal small fields with domestic animals pottering about, and honestly, it could have been rural England. Grey skies, damp air, a general sense that the weather hadn’t quite made up its mind. There’s a reason, of course, that this part of America is called New England — the early British settlers were clearly very homesick, and frankly, who could blame them.

🏡 The Village Itself

The Canterbury Shaker Village sits in rolling green hills — a genuinely serene spot that feels rather far removed from the rest of the world, which, one suspects, was rather the point. The buildings are plain and brilliantly white, stark against the green of the surrounding countryside, and there’s something immediately calming about the whole place. No clutter. No fuss. Very Shaker.

It’s worth noting that no Shakers actually live here anymore. Canterbury is now a museum, a carefully preserved record of a religious community that is, to all practical purposes, extinct. There are said to be just four members of the faith left in the entire world, all of them at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine. So visiting Canterbury felt a little like paying one’s respects, which seemed appropriate.

✝️ Who Were the Shakers?

The Shakers — properly known as The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, which is quite a mouthful for a Sunday morning — were a Protestant religious denomination that began in Manchester, England, in 1772. Their founder was a woman called Mother Ann Lee, who led a small group of nine believers from England to New York in 1774, no doubt hoping to find somewhere a bit more tolerant of their rather enthusiastic form of worship.

The name “Shakers” came from outsiders watching their services, which involved trembling, shouting, singing, dancing, and what you might politely call vigorous shaking. The more formal term was “Shaking Quakers,” which gives you a sense of both their origins and their energy. Over the next century they built 19 communal settlements across the northeastern United States and attracted somewhere in the region of 200,000 converts — quite remarkable for a movement that also insisted on strict celibacy.

That celibacy requirement is, of course, the rather glaring flaw in the business plan. The Shakers maintained their numbers not through the conventional method but through conversion and by taking in orphaned children. It worked after a fashion — membership peaked at around 6,000 full members in 1850. But turnover was high, as you might imagine, and the numbers declined steadily from there. By the early twentieth century the communities were already ageing, and by the mid-twentieth century several villages had closed entirely. Canterbury itself ceased to function as a living community in the 1990s.

🗓️ The Tours

Canterbury runs several tours throughout the day, and we have now been twice, which makes us practically regulars. On each visit we took a different tour, which was either very good planning or a happy accident — probably the latter, if we’re honest.

🏠 The Shaker Stories Tour

The Shaker Stories tour centres on the main dwelling house of the village, a large four-storey building that is about as orderly as anything you will ever set foot in. The building is symmetrically divided down the middle — brothers on one side, sisters on the other — with separate staircases, separate entrances, and separate everything. The Shakers took the separation of the sexes very seriously indeed, which, combined with the celibacy, presumably made for some rather quiet evenings.

Everything else, however, was communal. They worshipped together, ate together, and gathered together in shared sitting areas. Even the sleeping arrangements, such as they were, were communal — rooms shared by six or eight people, used strictly for sleeping and nothing more. Hence calling them “resting places” rather than bedrooms, which feels like a very Shaker thing to do.

What sets the Shakers apart from, say, the Amish — who similarly rejected the fripperies of modern life — was their entirely practical embrace of technology. If it made work more efficient, they were interested. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Canterbury community was generating its own electricity using acid-cell batteries, later upgrading to steam and gas-driven generators. For a community founded on simplicity, they were surprisingly ahead of the curve.

The bathroom we were shown on the sisters’ side was a genuine revelation. Dating from around 1905, it had wood panelling, linoleum flooring, ceramic sinks with both hot and cold running water, and flushing lavatories connected to a rudimentary sewage system. In 1905. That would have been the equal of anything found in the homes of wealthy New England families at the time. One has to admire that, even while acknowledging that the celibacy business would have been a complete dealbreaker for most of us.

🌿 The Contentment & Well-Being Tour

The Contentment and Well-Being Tour takes in several buildings across the village campus, and is a rather fascinating look at how a community committed to simplicity managed, simultaneously, to be rather progressive about health and medicine.

The infirmary was staffed by a resident doctor who treated not just members of the community but also people from the surrounding area — an early form of outreach, really, based on the perfectly sensible reasoning that if you help your neighbours, your neighbours are less likely to make your life difficult. Alongside the infirmary was a well-equipped dental surgery fitted with the most up-to-date equipment available at the time, which, depending on which period you’re thinking about, is either reassuring or mildly terrifying.

The Shakers also practised what we would now call mindfulness — a word that has been somewhat worked to death in recent years, but which, in the Shaker context, was woven directly into their daily worship and working life. They understood, centuries before it became fashionable, that mental well-being and physical health were not separate concerns.

The tour ventured out into the fields as well, where the farming practices were explained — the Shakers were serious about nutrition and grew much of their own food, understanding long before most that what you ate had a direct bearing on how you felt.

🌱 The Syrup House

The last stop on the tour was the Syrup House, a small building used for distilling sarsaparilla syrup for medicinal use within the community. Sarsaparilla — made from the root of the Smilax plant — was widely used in nineteenth-century American medicine as a remedy for everything from skin conditions to general debility. The Shakers, ever commercially minded, also sold their herbal medicines to the outside world, and by the mid-1800s their packaged remedies were known throughout the northeast. It is, frankly, one of the more endearing things about them: a community of celibate, trembling, furniture-making Christians who were also running what amounted to a pharmaceutical business. You couldn’t make it up.