Hancock Shaker Village and the Round Stone Barn
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
In the western Berkshire hills sits one of the best-preserved Shaker communities in the world. Hancock Shaker Village was organized in seventeen ninety, making it one of the earliest Shaker settlements in America. For a century and a half, a community of celibate, pacifist, deeply practical believers built a thriving agricultural and craft economy here, and what they left behind is extraordinary.
The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, believed that work was worship. Every object they made, from furniture to seed packets to the buildings themselves, expressed that theology in physical form. Simplicity, utility, and quiet elegance defined their aesthetic, and their designs were so far ahead of their time that Shaker furniture still commands reverence among designers today.
The crown of Hancock is the Round Stone Barn, built in eighteen twenty-six. It is the only circular barn the Shakers ever constructed, and it is an engineering tour de force. Wagons entered on the upper level, deposited hay into a central haymow below, then drove a full circuit and exited through the same door, eliminating the dangerous task of backing a horse-drawn wagon out of a narrow space. The barn originally stabled dozens of milk cows arranged in a radial pattern around the central mow, and a single farmer could feed all of them without retracing a single step.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville both visited the barn and wrote about it. After a fire in eighteen sixty-four the community rebuilt it, and a major restoration in nineteen sixty-eight preserved the original stone walls.
The last Shakers left Hancock in nineteen sixty. The village opened as a museum in nineteen sixty-one.
