New Gloucester, Maine

New Gloucester was incorporated in seventeen seventy-four, named after Gloucester, Massachusetts, by settlers who came north looking for farmland. But the town's most lasting distinction arrived in seventeen ninety-four, when a group of Shakers founded Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village just outside of town. It is today the last active Shaker community on earth.

At its height, Sabbathday Lake housed well over one hundred members living by Shaker principles: celibacy, communal property, equality of the sexes, and the belief that work itself was a form of worship. The Shakers made furniture of spare, functional beauty that is now prized by museums worldwide. A handful of members still live at Sabbathday Lake today, maintaining the faith and the village in a two-hundred-year-old tradition of extraordinary quiet.