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Six Historic Buildings With a Clerestory

The clerestory window makes a lot of sense in New England because of the short, short days during the long, long winter. The clerestory brings in much (and much-appreciated) light.

Technically, a clerestory is a high section of wall that contains windows above eye level to bring in fresh air as well as light. Sometimes people confuse them with widows walks, at least from outside.

One can find a clerestory window in all kinds of buildings. Here are six historic buildings with a clerestory.

General Henry Knox Museum, Thomaston, Maine

The Henry Knox house in Thomaston, Maine, has a clerestory.

The General Henry Knox Museum is a replica of the mansion the revolutionary leader built in 1794 — but a good replica. By 1871, his house had gotten run down and the Thomaston Railroad backers wanted it for a right of way. So it fell to the wrecking ball.

After the turn of the 20th century, community members raised money to rebuild the house on a different site but according to the original designs. Those designs include a large clerestory that fills the house with light down to the first floor.

30 High Street, Thomaston

West End Library, Farmington, Conn.

This mini-version of the Boston Public Library has something the BPL doesn’t: clerestory windows.

The National Park Service calls the old West End Library in the village of Unionville in Farmington, Conn., ‘an unusually intact example’ of the nearly 2,000 libraries Andrew Carnegie gave away. Today it looks much as it did when built in 1917: Even the toilet room in the basement is original.

Back around the turn of the century, cities and towns rarely supported public libraries with tax dollars (few, by the way, still do). Local library organizations had a hard time finding a place to store their books. So Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, gave away all of his fortune, mostly to libraries. He singlehandedly doubled the number of public libraries in the United States, giving away 1,689. Of those, 95 were in New England. All but three are still standing, including the West End Library in Farmington.

A nationally renowned architect, Edward Lippincott Tilton, designed the old West End Library, finished in 1917. Like many Carnegie libraries, the West End Library is a miniature version of a famous large library: in this case, the Boston Public Library. But unlike the Boston Public Library the West End Library has clerestory windows directly above the main arched windows in the front and back.

The building operated as library until 1968, when it became a senior center. Then in 1984 the town leased it to the nonprofit Unionville Museum.

The National Park Service called the library ‘a testament to small-town civic achievement.’ It has significance not just as a historic building but as a contributor to the character of the surrounding village of Unionville, a historic district since 1978.

15 School St, Unionville, Conn.

Tate House, Portland, Maine

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This house has a gambrel clerestory, once popular in New England. Now only two remain.

Capt. George Tate served as Maine’s last mast agent, overseeing the cutting and shipping of white pine trees to England for the Royal Navy’s masts. Tate may have thought the plum job set him up for life, but things began to go south for him.

Tate, born in 1700, moved with his family to the colonies around 1750s. He built himself a fine house in 1755 in what is now the Stroudwater Historic District, a section of Portland cut off from the rest of the city and containing many 18^th and 19^th-century homes.

The king’s first mast agent in Maine, Col. Thomas Westbrook, settled Stroudwater. He built some of the roads, a dam, a bridge, and sawmills and gristmills — in short, an early industrial village that thrived on the processing of white pine trees.

Tate brought paneling and wainscoating from England; the unpainted clapboard exterior disguises the lavish interior. The Tate House has a clerestory gambrel roof, once a common form of colonial architecture. Only one other survives in New England, in the Burnham Tavern in Machias, Maine.

But then in 1770 his wife Mary died at age 60. According to an entry on the findagrave website,

Mary Tate was killed by a booby trap set by her son William to catch thieves. William was convicted of her murder but was later pardoned by George III.

Then, of course, revolution broke out, in part due to resentment of the king appropriating the colonies’ white pine trees.

George Tate lived to be 94, dying in 1794. The house opens to the public in the warmer months.

1270 Westbrook Street, Stroudwater neighborhood, Portland, Maine.

Shaker Barn, Hancock, Mass.

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The clerestory in this barn let in light for milking cows and fresh air for preventing hay from combusting.

Shakers established Hancock Shaker Village in 1791, the third of 19 started between 1783 and 1836 Closed in 1960.

Built in 1820, the barn at the Hancock Shaker Village was probably the first round barn in the United States.

A model of efficiency and clever design, the barn has three levels, each with a specific use. The Shakers designed the big fieldstone barn for 52 cows, but it can hold 70. Once constructed, it attracted visitors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who raced each other on foot inside the building.

After a fire, the Shakers replaced the conical roof with a clerestory that let in light and fresh air, which prevented the spontaneous combustion of wet hay.

A ramp takes wagons filled with hay to the third level; because the barn is round, the wagons never have to back up, they simple circumnavigate the barn and exit through the same door they entered.

From the third level, Shakers could pitch hay to the cows on the second level, where they were milked.

The cows’ heads fit into stanchions so they could feed while they were milked. At the cows’ rear ends, the Shakers built trap doors so they could easily shovel manure into the first level. They let it accumulate until they spread it on fields for fertilizer.

34 Lebanon Mountain Rd., Hancock, Mass.

Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, N.H.

The clerestory in this Georgian house came from an English pattern book.

The Samuel Tenney house at one time or another involved five well-known New Hampshire figures: Dr. Samuel Tenney, who tended wounded soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill; his wife Tabitha, the first best-selling author in America; Tristan Shaw, U.S. congressman; Ebenezer Clifford, inventive master carpenter; and Bradbury Johnson, builder-architect.

Samuel Tenney built the house around 1800 where the courthouse now stands. Born in 1748, he served as a surgeon to the army to the end of the American Revolution. George Washington appointed him acting surgeon general at Valley Forge. After the war he had a long and distinguished career as a judge, U.S. congressman, author and scientist.

Tabitha Tenney was the best-selling novelist in the country for the first half of the 19^th century. Her novel, Female Quixotism, poked fun at the illusions of romance. Published in 1799, the book was still in print when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Ebenezer Clifford and Bradbury Johnson together built several landmark buildings in Exeter, including the First Parish Church, the second Phillips Exeter Academy building and the Atknson Academy building. The two men creatively adapted designs from English pattern books as the gabled clerestory in the Tenney house shows. Clifford, by the way, built and designed a diving bell that he used in the Exeter River.

Finally, U.S. Rep. Tristran Shaw lived in the Tenney house in the early 19^th century. The house was moved to its current location on High Street to make way for the courthouse.

65 High St., Exeter, N.H.

Upper Rockville Mill, Hopkinton, R.I.

The clerestory in this Rhode Island textile mill let more workers work longer.

The Upper Rockville Mill, built in 1844, typifies the granite mill buildings that dotted Hopkinton, R.I., in the 19^th century. What’s different about the Upper Rockville Mill: It used water power well into the 20^th century, and didn’t stop making textiles until the late 1980s or early 1990s.

The Rockville Manufacturing Company built the big granite mill on a hill in 1844, and ever since it has served as the town’s most prominent architectural feature. Like many Rhode Island cotton mills, it had clerestory windows that allowed more natural light and usable work space in the mill’s attic.

Two years later the Seventh Day Baptists built a church, and from then on village life revolved around the mill and the church. Seventh Day Baptists owned the mill, and everyone who worked there belonged to the church. As many as half the workforce were women and children.

The mill made cotton yarn, cloth, fishing line, twine and cord. Since it relied on water power, it could never expand too much, but it could survive for more than a century.

Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Upper Rockville for two reasons: It demonstrates the rise of the textile industry in New England, and how that industry created many mill villages in rural towns. In 1850, Hopkinton alone had more than a dozen mill villages.

332 Canonchet Rd., Hopkinton, R.I.

Christ Episcopal Church, Montpelier, Vt.

Christ Episcopal Church features a large round clerestory window ‘to the glory of Almighty God.’

The neo-Gothic Christ Episcopal Church reflects Montpelier’s growth and prosperity after the Civil War. The parish in 1868 replaced an old frame church built 30 years earlier with a substantial stone building. It had both a 100-foot tower and spire and a stained-glass clerestory window, a key feature in Gothic churches.

The building, though, suffered repeated damage. In 1903, a fire ruined the roof and the interior. Then in 1927 the flood that devastated Vermont also devastated the church, undermining its structural integrity. Though the parish repaired the church, it had to remove the spire in 1963. Then in 2015, a crane collapsed and crashed through the roof. Once again, the church required repair.

Today Christ Episcopal Church stands as one of five historic churches built in Montpelier between 1865 and 1873. All survive and belong to the Montpelier Historic District.

64 State St., Montpelier, Vt.

Images: West End Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Unionville, Connecticut Uploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29970923; Round barn at Hancock Shaker Village: By Bestbudbrian – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51387903; Samuel Tenney House, By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25270039; Christ Episcopal Church By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18509487; Tate House By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28918831.; Upper Rockville Mill By Tmac02892 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6897440. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Haunted Murder Scene in Each New England State

If you’re looking for a haunted murder scene, New England has plenty of them. The region is awash in old taverns where the ghosts of murder victims move furniture at night or cemeteries where they float above gravestones.

New England has always embraced tales of the supernatural. New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape populate the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. There’s even a name for the region’s special brand of horror: Gothic New England.

Here then is a haunted murder scene in each New England state.

The Murder Scene at Union Cemetery

The White Lady’s murder scene? Union Cemetery at night.

One autumn night a man knelt by his wife’s grave in 400-year-old Union Cemetery in Easton, Conn. He missed her, and it comforted him to talk to her.

After a short while he looked up from the grave and saw a ghostly figure watching him. She had long dark hair and wore a diaphanous white veil and an old-fashioned white dress or nightgown.

“I wish my husband would have loved me as much as you love your wife,” she said, and then she vanished.

Some people believe the White Lady was murdered. Her body, they think, was dumped behind the Easton Baptist Church next to the cemetery. Others believe she murdered her husband. Whatever the case, the White Lady is one of Connecticut’s most famous ghosts. People have seen her walking among the gravestones and floating above them. She also appears to motorists on Route 59.

Whether it’s because it abuts a murder scene or because it’s so old, Union Cemetery has been called the most haunted cemetery in Connecticut. The cemetery attracts so many ghost hunters the Easton police have closed it off to traffic at night.

Johnny Winter and Harry Reasoner are also buried in Union Cemetery, but so far as we know they do not haunt the place.

Easton, Conn.

Wood Island Lighthouse

A lighthouse and a haunted murder scene: Wood Island Light.

In 1896, local sheriff Fred Milliken rented his chicken coop on Wood Island to Howard Hobbs, a drifter, to sleep in. The two men argued, and Hobbs shot the sheriff. He then went to the lighthouse keeper’s house and shot himself there.

Hobbs’ spirit haunts the murder scene at the Wood Island lighthouse, located off Biddeford Pool in Maine. People have heard moans and strange voices, seen dark shadows and found locked doors mysteriously opened.

The story doesn’t end there. One lighthouse keeper was so spooked by the haunting that he left the lamp unlit and rowed to the mainland. He found a room in a boardinghouse and jumped to his death the next morning.

20 Yates St., Biddeford, ME

The Lizzie Borden House

The Fall River hatchet murder scene is now a popular bed and breakfast.

Lizzie Borden, a 31-year-old single woman, famously took an axe and killed her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Mass. Or did she? The debate continues since the couple was found murdered on Aug. 4, 1891.

A jury acquitted Lizzie of murder nearly a year later. Many thought she got away with the crime. Others think the maid did it, or perhaps Lizzie’s uncle, who provided an absurdly overdetailed alibi.

Whatever the case, Lizzie continued to live in Fall River, ostracized by the community, until her death at age 66. The murder scene was turned into a popular bed and breakfast in 1996. Guests most often request the room where Lizzie’s stepmother met her end.

Ghost hunters sometimes stay in the house to investigate paranormal activity. A floor will creak in an empty room, or doors will open and close mysteriously. Sometimes the proprietor smells a faint flowery scent, and once the hallway chandelier suddenly turned off and a shadow climbed the stairs.

Today, a popular rhyme persists about the murders:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

92 Second St., Fall River, Mass.

The Country Tavern

The Country Tavern in Nashua, a murder scene long ago.

In 1741, a sea captain named Ford built a house in what is now Nashua, N.H. He brought his much younger wife Elizabeth to live there while he went to sea.

Once, after a 10-month absence at sea, he returned to find Elizabeth and her new baby. In a fit of rage he locked Elizabeth in a closet and killed the infant. When Elizabeth emerged to find out what he’d done, she attacked her husband. Capt. Ford then stabbed her with a knife and threw her body down a well.

In the 1980s, Elizabeth Ford’s farmhouse became a popular eatery, the Country Tavern. Her ghost supposedly haunts the murder scene, but in a playful way. She moves salt and pepper shakers, tosses dishes off shelves and runs her fingers through patrons’ hair. Sometimes she makes an appearance in a window on the second floor, gazing out over the property.

452 Amherst St., Nashua, N.H.

The Biltmore Hotel Murder Scene

The lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, scene of murders and suicides during Prohibition.

In 1918, a rumored Satanist named Johan Leisse Weisskopf financed construction of the Biltmore Hotel (now known as Graduate Providence). He supposedly installed chicken coops on the roof to supply birds for ritual sacrifices and dug hot springs in the basement for purification rites.

During Prohibition, the Biltmore became a speakeasy frequented by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. The hotel hosted raucous parties that supposedly resulted in the murders of several guests. Today, Biltmore guests say they hear laughing and dancing from an empty room, once, perhaps, a murder scene.

The most famous ghost, though, belongs to a wealthy guest who threw himself off the 14^th floor of the Biltmore when the stock market crashed in 1929. Hotel guests say they’ve seen a man plummet past their windows, only to look down and see no body on the sidewalk.

11 Dorrance St., Providence, R.I.

College Hall, Vermont College of Fine Arts

The ghost of Anna Wheeler haunts College Hall.

College Hall at the Vermont College of Fine Arts was built near an 1897 murder scene involving a jealous lover.

On a Saturday morning, 17-year-old Anna planned to meet her fiance, Jack Wheeler, a handsome 22-year-old stonecutter. They would take the train to Barre that day to watch the Decoration Day celebration. She lived on East Liberty Street where her cousins, the Bugbees, had hired her to do domestic work.

Mildred Brewster, 20, went to the Bugbee house and waited on the porch for 20 minutes before knocking on the door. The two women talked inside for 45 minutes, and a witness later testified to overhearing the conversation. Mildred said, “Jack Wheeler can’t be engaged to us both; we will have to let him decide.”

Mildred and Anna then walked past the Montpelier Seminary, now College Hall, toward Jack Wheeler’s house. Then Mildred took out a .32 caliber revolver and shot Anna, then herself. Anna died that afternoon, but Mildred lived to be charged with murder. A jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she spent the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums.

Anna’s ghost now haunts College Hall near the murder scene, closing doors, moving objects, breaking glass and throwing pictures off walls. Once she supposedly moved furniture to block the door of a locked office.

36 College St., Montpelier, Vt.

If you enjoyed this story about haunted murder scenes, you may want to read our story about haunted houses in New England here.

Haunted murder scene images: Union Cemetery By Karl Thomas Moore – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46789828; Biltmore Lobby By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21843548. This story last updated in 2021.

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John Humphrey Noyes Finds Out Sex and Silverware Don’t Mix

John Humphrey Noyes started out in the 19^th century as a conventional Yale-trained minister until he found out he was perfect and without sin.

He attracted hundreds of followers who liked thinking they were perfect, too. They followed John Humphrey Noyes to his utopian communities in Putney, Vt., Wallingford, Conn., and Oneida, N.Y.

There they prospered. But John Humphrey Noyes liked sex as much as he liked being perfect, and he wound up fleeing to Canada.

He left a legacy, though, on millions of dining room tables throughout the world.

John Humphrey Noyes

He was born in Brattleboro, Vt., on Sept. 3, 1811, with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, John Noyes, went to Congress, and his mother, Polly Hayes Noyes had a nephew who became president of the Unite States, Rutherford B. Hayes.

John Humphrey Noyes’ well-to-do family sent him to Dartmouth and then to Yale Theological Seminary.

In his second year in seminary, he decided Christ had already come a second time in 70 A.D. He then had a religious conversion, his second, after which he proclaimed he did not sin. His friends, unsurprisingly, began to think him unbalanced.

He converted a woman named Harriet Holton to his doctrine of Perfectionism, and they married in 1838. During the first six years of marriage she gave birth five times, but only one of their children lived. The couple then began living apart. He said the separation brought them both satisfaction that they had never before experienced.

Utopian Living

John Humphrey Noyes attracted about 40 followers of his Perfectionism, mostly New England farmers. After Yale kicked him out of school, Noyes and his followers moved to Putney, Vt.

In the mid-1840s, the Putney community began to experiment with communal living.

The Oneida community between 1865-75.

They shared some traits with the Shakers. For example, they believed in working for the good of the community, not just for oneself. And the whole community raised their children.

Unlike the Shakers, who didn’t have sex, the Perfectionists believed in having sex with multiple partners.

They didn’t hide their beliefs, which horrified Vermonters. A mob drove them out of Putney even as the state attorney general issued arrest warrants for John Humphrey Noyes on the grounds of adultery.

The Perfectionists moved to Oneida, N.Y., where they took out a mortgage for $2,000 on 40 acres of land, an old house, an abandoned Indian hut and an old Indian saw mill.

Silverware and Hats

They started out poor, sleeping on the floor of the old house. But they worked hard, sawing lumber for neighbors, raising crops and small fruit and making rustic furniture, silk thread, traps and palm frond hats. John Humphrey Noyes took up blacksmithing. Eventually the Oneidans starting making their famous silverware.

The community benefited from its remoteness and its simple living. It was so far from population centers that its young men didn’t have to register for the draft during the Civil War. And they used so few consumer goods they reinvested their profit in their business ventures.

The Perfectionists set up a satellite community in Wallingford, Conn., where they made matchboxes, and in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they made traveling bags. Two other small offshoots started in Newark, N.J., and Cambridge, Vt. After about a decade of hard work, they had accumulated a net worth of $67,000.

By 1875, they were worth $180,580 with about 300 members.

Criticism Prevents Novel Reading

They created a unique form of government called ‘criticism.’ It cured all sorts of faults, including selfishness, idleness, rudeness and a love of novel-reading.

Cartoon of Charles Guiteau

In 1875 a New York journalist named Charles Nordhoff visited the Oneida community and watched a session of criticism. John Humphrey Noyes sat in a large rocking chair as a group of 15 criticized a young man named Charles, who sat in the middle of the room.

Charles, they told him, sometimes used slang, acted supercilious and haughty and sometimes used pet names for people he liked. One critic said Charles had condemned the beefsteak as tough and made other unnecessary remarks about the food on the table.

Charles himself conceded he had started to think religion wasn’t important, but he was correcting that error.

Criticism, apparently, didn’t work too well on one member of the community. Charles Guiteau lived in Oneida for five years before going off to assassinate President James Garfield.

Stirpiculture

But it was John Humphrey Noyes’ views on sex that got him into trouble. He believed in ‘complex marriage,’ or what others call polygamy.

He also believed people should create children intentionally rather than through haphazard sex. But John Humphrey Noyes believed the Christian view of sex — limited to marriage — had the effect of sexually starving young people from about age 14 until they wed.

He solved the problem by having young men practice having sex with older Perfectionist women who’d gone through menopause. That way, the young men could practice delaying gratification, which was Noyes’ preferred method of birth control. He also believed women had the right to choose whether to have a child.

John Humphrey Noyes reserved most of the community’s young virgins for himself.

Another odd practice: Men asked women to have sex through a third party. At least that cushioned the letdown.

By 1869, John Humphrey Noyes began encouraging the best and brightest young people to have children. He called it ‘stirpiculture’; others called it eugenics. That’s when the community began to have trouble, because parents wanted to raise their own children.

Families also began to raise their children for a competitive, capitalist society rather than for the communal good.

Trouble

Noyes also ran afoul of Anthony Comstock, a young New York reformer who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
In 1879, John Humphrey Noyes heard a rumor that he was to be arrested for breaking the state’s marriage laws, so he fled to Canada. He died there on April 13, 1886.

The Oneida community went on to form a corporation. The business leaders determined the new company’s most profitable products were plated spoons. Eventually, the Oneida company grew into the world’s largest producer of flatware.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Barns

Thousands of New England’s historic barns have survived severe weather, westward migration, suburban sprawl and competition from corporate agribusiness.

Often connected to other farm buildings and the farmhouse, they usually had many uses. Historic barns sheltered dairy cows, teams of oxen, horses, hay and crops.

Some historic barns, on the other hand, were built specifically for one purpose, like Connecticut tobacco or Vermont dairy cows.

But typical New England farm families grew a variety of crops and livestock, making and selling anything to support the farm. A New England farmer might sell maple syrup, timber, clothing, hard cider and barrels. He might run a tavern, or rent out his rooms or his beehives.

Big House, Little House…

Northern New England’s historic barns often connect to the house and to other buildings, Thomas L. Hubka described such connected farm buildings as ‘Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn.’

Though you might assume New Englanders connected their houses to outbuildings because of the weather, you would be only partly right.

According to Hubka, the agricultural reform movement beginning in the early 19^th century inspired New England farmers to make their farms more efficient.

So they connected their houses with such outbuildings as barns, ells, chicken coops, sugar houses, woodsheds, workshops and carriage sheds.

Farming as a way of life has waned in New England, but the public appetite for locally grown, unadulterated food is sparking a revival on a smaller scale.

If you have any favorite historic barns in New England, please share them in the comments section.

Windsor Tobacco Barn

Two of Windsor’s historic barns that sheltered shade tobacco. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Tobacco loved the sandy soil of Windsor, Conn., and in 1640 farmers began planting tobacco seeds from Virginia. As cigar smoking grew popular in the early 19th century, Connecticut farmers began to specialize in cigar binders using Broadleaf and Havana Seed. Eventually, they grew a light, tasty tobacco under tents of hand-woven cloth (hence ‘shade tobacco’) to use as wrappers.

By the middle of the 19th century, Connecticut emerged as a leading producer of tobacco. The tobacco Valley ran from Springfield to Hartford.

Tobacco farmers relied on seasonal labor from college campuses in the South, including Morehead College, which sent a young Martin Luther King, Jr., to Simsbury. They also used local child labor. World War II and the passage of child labor laws forced farmers to rely on immigrant workers from Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

Health concerns and competition from mass-produced cigar wrappers caused Connecticut’s tobacco acreage to dwindle.

Windsor produced more shade tobacco than anywhere else in the state. So in 1988, the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society formed in Windsor to preserve artifacts from the era. The historical society’s Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum is located in Northwest Park in Windsor.

135 Lang Road, Windsor, Connecticut

Sabbathday Lake Barns

The Shakers built these classic examples of New England historic barns. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Ann Lee founded the Shaker sect, formally known as the The United Society of Believers, in Manchester, England, in 1847. Lee broke away from the Quakers, and her followers were known as the ‘Shaking Quakers’ because of their ecstatic dancing during Sunday meeting.

After Ann Lee – known as ‘Mother Ann’ – went to prison for her beliefs, she came to America with eight followers in 1774.

The Shakers expanded to 19 utopian communities throughout the Northeast and Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia and Florida. They preached a doctrine of celibacy, self-sufficiency, pacifism, communal living and equality between the sexes.

In 1794, the Shakers formed Sabbathday Lake near New Gloucester and Poland, Maine,

By the 1840s, the Sabbathday Lake Shakers had carved a large enterprise out of the Maine forests. They owned 1,900 acres and 26 large buildings, including barns, a meetinghouse, a blacksmith shop and a large dwelling house.

The Sabbathay Lake Shakers built their barns in the New England style, the most common found in the region. Larger than typical barns in other parts of the country, they have doors at the ends and basements. The Shakers built the Sabbathday Lake barns into the side of a hill, which allowed them to access the upper floor from the ground.

The Shakers peaked in the 1840s, with 6,000 members throughout the United States. Their belief in celibacy would doom them to slow, near extinction.

But for many years during the 19^th century, the simple, self-sufficient Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, sold their products to the luxury-loving guests and the owners of the Poland Spring Hotel.

707 Shaker Road, New Gloucester, Maine

Old Tavern Farm

Like many historic barns in New England, the Old Tavern barn connects to the other farm buildings.

Like many historic barns in Northern New England, the barn at the Old Tavern Farm in Greenfield, Mass., connects to buildings with other uses.

The Old Tavern Farm served many purposes over the centuries, reverting today to its original use as a bed and breakfast.

The farm’s early owners supplemented their farm income by running a tavern – or perhaps it was the other way around. They served neighbors and travelers along the Old Post Road

The tavern also served as a meeting place, a courtroom and a newsroom, noted the registration form for the National Register of Historic Places. The property doubled as a military training field, sports arena, stockyard and fairgrounds.

Samuel Hinsdale inherited the farm from his father, Mehuman Hinsdale, once taken captive by Indians in the 1704 raid on Deerfield. Hinsdale began building on the land in 1740, and by 1747 he operated a tavern.The main house was built around 1820, but the wing was built in 1794 on Hinsdale’s foundation.

Others ran the tavern from 1836 until 1860, when the temperance movement shut it down. The Smith family ran the 160-acre farm from the latter part of the 19th century until 1997.

817 Colrain Road, Greenfield, Massachusetts

Bennett Farm

That cupola on the Bennett Farm’s barn was once a steeple.

Ocean Born Mary’s son Thomas Wallace once owned the land in Henniker that became the Bennett Farm. The son of the legendary New Hampshire woman then sold it to Joseph Lewis in 1777. Its subsequent owners ran it as a tavern until 1848. From that point on, its owners ran it as a typical Northern New England farm.

The barn was built in 1834 as a religious meeting house. Around 1860, the Bennett Farm’s barn burned down, so the farm’s owner moved the meeting house to the farm and converted it to a barn. The top of the steeple blew off during the Hurricane of 1938, leaving a cupola. .

Mark Bennett bought the farm in 1902, and his son Stephen took over when his father died in 1925 and ran it into the 1960s. Stephen’s son now runs the farm.

“Bennett Farm as it survives today conveys the character and scale of a late 19th-early 20th century diversified family farm,” notes The National Register of Historic Places registration form.

11 Bennett Rd., Henniker, New Hampshire

Mount Hope Farm

See Mount Hope’s historic barn at the Saturday farmer’s market held at Mount Hope.

The Mount Hope Farm in Bristol, R.I., includes a mansion built in 1745 and expanded in 1840 and 1895, and two historic barns built in 1860. But it also owes its significance to its storied owners and connected events.

Once the traditional seat of the Wampanoag Indians, Benjamin Church killed King Philip nearby. The colonists then confiscated the land, and the wealthy merchant and slave owner Isaac Royall, Jr., built the farmhouse in 1745. But Royall’s Loyalist sympathies forced him to move to Halifax at the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The State of Rhode Island then confiscated the land again. Proceeds from the sale of Mount Hope went to pay Continental Army officers and soldiers.

William Bradford, great, great grandson of the Pilgrim governor, bought the house in 1783, and George Washington visited him for a week there. Bradford later won election to the U.S. Senate. The farm is also known as the Governor Bradford House, though he only served as deputy governor.

In the early 1950’s, the then-owner, Rudolf F. Haffenreffer, III, deeded Mount Hope and approximately 250 acres of the original farm to Brown University.

“Today, this handsome estate with its historic mansion and beautiful gardens, is an island of tranquility in an increasingly urban landscape,” noted the National Register of Historic Places registration form.

250 Metacom Ave., Bristol, Rhode Island

Shelburne Farms Horseshoe Barn

The Horseshoe Barn at Shelburne Museum.

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, created a classic Gilded Age gentleman farm in Shelburne, Vt.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course.

Among Shelburne Farms’ historic barns is the horseshoe barn, not one of the original buildings designed by architect Robert Henderson Robertson. It was built later as the next generation of Vanderbilts struggled to keep up the farm.

The Webbs’ daughter-in-law, Electra Havemeyer Webb, turned Shelburne Farms into a museum. She wanted a proper setting for the carriage collection, so she searched and found a rare horseshoe-shaped dairy born in Georgia, Vt.

Because the owner refused to sell it, Electra had her staff find, move and assemble hand-hewn beams from 12 historic barns and stone from two gristmills. They finished the 238-foot-long barn in 1949.

In 1957, the museum built the annex to house 150 more vehicles added to the collection.

In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows. It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Bennett Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19490337; Old Tavern Farm By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24500134.

Mount Hope Barn by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28160904.

This story about historic barns was updated in 2023.

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Mother Ann’s Work, or How a Lot of Embarrassing Ghosts Visited the Shakers

From 1837 to the mid-1840s, Shaker communities received a flood of ghostly visits they called Mother Ann’s Work.

Their dead founder, Mother Ann Lee, was the first to stop by. Then came prophets, Indians, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Pocahantas and George Washington. Angels visited to dictate long messages, while other spirits brought songs and dances. Tecumseh’s ghost told the Shakers he’d converted all his chiefs to Shakerism.

The visitors sometimes arrived quietly and appeared to lone individuals. But sometimes they came during worship services and inspired frenzied dancing, shaking, twitching, whirling, jerking and singing. And sometimes they inspired a Shaker to babble in a strange pidgin.

The Shakers called it the Era of Manifestation, a time of spiritual revival when Shakers received Mother Ann’s Work. Eventually, they decided the spiritual visits were a little embarrassing, and closed their doors to flesh-and-blood visitors.

Mother Ann’s Work included dances and songs from spirit visitors.

A Brief Shaker History

On Dec. 30, 1841, the Shakers in Harvard, Mass., reported Mother Ann, their dead founder, had paid them a visit. So had Holy Angels and ancient saints and departed spirits.

Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, had had her own visions. She was 21 in 1757 when she joined the Shaking Quakers in Manchester, England. Authorities put her in prison for her beliefs. There she had her vision that the only road to salvation ran through celibacy and confession.

Shaker barns at Sabbathday Lake

Once released from prison, she emigrated to upstate New York. In 1781 she and eight followers founded the colony in Harvard, Mass., because she’d seen the place in a vision.

Mother Ann died in 1784, and her followers in Harvard decided they should live away from the world in their own community. Women and men were separate but equal – literally, as they practiced celibacy. They also practiced tolerance, as they accepted Jews, Indians and African-Americans. The Shakers held property in common and lived according to the principles of simplicity, honesty and usefulness.

Despite their ban on sex, the Shakers grew and spread. They established dozens of U.S. communities, about a dozen in New England. In Maine, the Shakers built communities in Alfred, Gorham and Sabbathday Lake. They settled one village in Enfield, Conn., and two in New Hampshire, in Canterbury and Enfield. Massachusetts had five, in Hancock, Harvard, Savoy, Tyringham and Shirley.

But by the 1830s, the original leaders of the Shaker communities had nearly all died.

Mother Ann’s Work

The visions began on Aug. 12, 1837, in the Watervliet, N.Y., Shaker community. Gideon Kibben had a vision of Mother Ann Lee leading the heavenly host through the village, three or four feet off the ground.

A Shaker boxmaker at Hancock Shaker Village.

Soon, young girls started having visions in Watervliet. A spirit visitor took Anne Mariah Goff to a square building where she met Ann Lee dressed in shining white robes and then stroked an angel’s feathers. Pocahantas appeared to another, while other young girls spoke in tongues and fell into trances, sometimes lasting as long as seven hours.

Word of the visions spread throughout the Shaker community, and soon the spirits visited others. The Shakers called them Mother Ann’s Work, because they believed her spirit was returning to revive the next generation’s faith.

In Enfield, Conn., Mother Ann’s Gifts included lights, disembodied spirits and the sound of angels flying.

The Harvard Shaker community also received Mother Ann’s Gifts. Once, a spiritual visitor communicated pointed testimonies against sin through ‘poor little Edwin Myrick,’ described as ‘the simpleton.’

Alexander the Great visited Harvard and asked a Shaker her name, according to an unpublished manuscript on Shaker history. She said, ‘Ann Alexander.’ His joy, apparently, knew no bounds. “He exclaimed through the Visionest, (which in this instance was Ann Alexander herself) beautiful! beautiful! This is right, this is as it should be. Ann! Mother’s name! Alexander! my own, what a glorious union of names.”

Simple Gifts

The spirit visitors brought gifts in the form of songs, prophecies and drawings. One Harvard Shaker, Joanna Randall, received gifts of 62 songs in three months from 1844-45. The well-known song, Simple Gifts, was said to be Mother Ann’s Work in Alfred, Maine.

Hannah Cohoon, a 67-year-old Shaker in Hancock, Mass., received a gift in the form of the Tree of Life drawing. She described how it happened:

…the spirit showed me plainly the branches, leaves, and fruit presented or drawn upon paper. The leaves were checked or (unreadable) and the same color you see here. I entreated Mother Ann to tell me the name of this tree which she did Oct 1st 4th hour PM by moving the hand of a medium to write twice over Your Tree is the Tree of Life.

Ridicule

Mother Ann’s Work attracted real live visitors who came to ridicule the sect.

One spirit visitor told the Harvard Shakers to sow seeds of peace before they planted their crops. The Shakers then marched through the fields, sowing and watering invisible seeds.

“Those who often saw frenzied women “whirling” along the public road for long distances, and dancing with rhythmic shaking of heads, hands and arms dignified into a ceremonial of worship, were tempted to jeering comment and ridicule,” wrote Henry Stedman Nourse in his History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts.

In 1841, the Shakers decided to close their doors to outsiders during their rituals.

By 1845, the Age of Manifestations began to ebb and eventually ran its course. The Shaker communities declined after the Civil War, and today only one active Shaker village remains, Sabbathday Lake.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Irving Greenwood, Shaker Brother, Buys a Cadillac

On Aug. 6, 1920, Shaker Brother Irving Greenwood brought a new Cadillac home to Canterbury Shaker Village. It was a beauty, he wrote in his diary.

A 1919 Cadillac

The Cadillac arrived 146 years to the day after a poor group of immigrants led by Mother Ann Lee landed in America. The Shakers by then had grown and prospered, with 18 Shaker villages in New England, New York, Ohio and Kentucky.

Though the Shakers embraced a simple farm life, they were not averse to labor-saving devices. In fact, they invented some, including a washing machine.

Irving Greenwood lived at Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, N.H., for 53 years until his death in 1939. He recorded in his diary how the Shakers changed and adapted as their number dwindled. He was often the agent of that change.

“The persistent image many have of Brother Irving is a photo that shows him relaxing and listening to his homemade radio, while his beloved dog Dewey (1920-1930), a gift from the Union Village Shakers, rests at his side,” wrote Stephen J. Paterwic in Historical Dictionary of the Shakers.

Irving Greenwood Arrives

The main dwelling at Canterbury Shaker Village.

Irving Greenwood – Ervin Elmer Greenwood on his birth certificate — was taken to Canterbury Shaker Village, 12 miles north of Concord, N.H., by his grandmother and two Shaker sisters. It was Sept. 18, 1886, and Elmer was a month shy of his 10^th birthday. He came from Providence, where his mother had died when he was six years old and his father couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take care of him.

When he arrived, the 94-year-old Canterbury Shaker Village had declined to about 100 members from its peak of 300 in 1850. Women far outnumbered men. The village had 73 females and 28 males, leaving plenty of heavy lifting for men, including Irving Greenwood.

From the time he was 17, Irving Greenwood kept a diary. “Worked at the barn” was his first entry on Feb. 20, 1894. There were many others like it: “Begin sawing wood in dooryard today.” “We boys all help the sisters pick apples in the blacksmith shop field.” “Help shingle.” “Plant corn, beans, peas & beets. Plant squash in the tanning house field upper side.” “Stamp 10 dozen butter boxes with our stamp.”

Hands To Work

General view of Canterbury Shaker Village

The Shakers had a motto: “Hands to work, hearts to God.” They worked hard. Shaker brothers tended the dairy herd and farmed. Shaker sisters made fancy work to sell – sewing, knitting, weaving, baskets and boxes. The Shakers then took the merch to New York and Boston before Christmas, resort hotels in the White Mountains and on the seashore in summer and in Florida and the Carolinas in winter. Today Shaker baskets, boxes and furniture are highly collectible.

The Canterbury Shakers also sold applesauce, butter, maple syrup, herbs and seeds, and published a Shaker periodical.

Their hard work paid off. Canterbury Shaker Village had 3000 acres, a dairy herd, a library, an infirmary and many other buildings, including the largest frame barn in New Hampshire.

Each community was organized into a family that included brothers and sisters and the children for whom they cared. They were celibate, though. They had to replenish their numbers with orphans, foster children and adult converts with their children. “We make you kindly welcome,” was another motto.

Children could leave when they turned 21 — or become a Shaker brother or sister. The Elders decided when an adult convert or child who reached 21 was spiritually ready for that.

Irving Greenwood chose to stay. He learned how to tend a herd of dairy cattle, plow, drive horse teams and run the sawmill.

He was a natural engineer. “In 1910, he wired the village for electricity,” wrote Pateric. “He also built a power plant. Whether it was water pipes or machinery, Brother Irving seemed to be ready with a solution.”

He became a trusted leader of the community as it shrank and adapted to changing times. His diary tells of very old Shakers dying and of young boys leaving. Eventually the Canterbury Shakers had to hire help to work their farm and livestock.

The Shakers Change

Irving Greenwood recorded how the Shakers adapted to the outside world in other ways. Until the turn of the century, they wore plain, handwoven clothing they made themselves. Then the brothers began to buy their clothes and women bought fabric for dresses.

On July 13, 1891, he wrote, “I go to Belmont in the eve. Buy some straw hats for the boys & sneakers for Arthur.”

The sect had originally been called Shakers because of their vigorous dancing during worship (it shook out sin), but they no longer danced by the time Irving Greenwood arrived in 1886.

Shakers dancing out sin

On Jan. 18, 1895, he wrote in his diary, “Discontinue kneeling after meals.”

That year, a relative of Irving’s friend Henry Hathaway bought a bicycle both Irving and Henry used. In the early 19^th century the Shakers would have forbidden a personal recreational item. When they caught on to the bicycle craze, the Shakers made machine-knitted bicycle stockings to sell.

The Shakers did get to have fun. Music was an important part of their lives, and the sisters often put on musical entertainment for the community.

A Shaker friend of Irving Greenwood was named a trustee to handle the community’s business affairs. Sometimes Irving went with him on business trips to New York or Boston and attended the symphony, the opera or the theater. He also went to auto shows.

Road Trip

Irving Greenwood took his first trip in the Cadillac on Sunday, May 4, 1919. He drove his Shaker brothers and sisters in it to doctors’ appointments, on sales trips and buying trips, to concerts in Boston and on errands like buying ice cream.

He bought another Cadillac from the factory in Michigan in 1920 and drove it back to New Hampshire. On Aug. 1, 1920, he reached Cleveland. He washed the car, got lunch and made reservation for a boat ride.

And then he drove to a streetcar suburb called Shaker Heights, just east of Cleveland. Two railroad moguls had built the community on the remains of an old Shaker village. Little was left, save for the ruins of an old gristmill and the mill ponds the Shakers had built.

Shaker Heights across from a lake built by Shakers.

Irving Greenwood wrote, “Go out to Shaker Heights that used to be North Union. There is nothing to show there was ever a Shaker Village there.”

Irving Greenwood died after suffering a stroke in 1939. The Shaker population of Canterbury had fallen by half. By 1950 it was down to 16. The last Canterbury Shaker died in 1992.

Images: Shaker Heights By Spencer – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4434434. This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read Household Tips from Shaker Village, a special for members of the New England Historical Society.

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