Mount Lebanon: The Capital of the Shaker World
Near Lenox, New York
In the hills of Columbia County, New York, just west of the Massachusetts border, lies the site of what was once the spiritual and administrative capital of one of America's most distinctive religious communities.
The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, were founded by Ann Lee, an English textile worker who immigrated to America in seventeen seventy-four with a small band of followers. Lee taught that God had both male and female qualities, that celibacy was a path to spiritual perfection, and that worship should be expressed through ecstatic movement, which gave the sect its name. She died in seventeen eighty-four, but the converts she made in the Hudson Valley and New England outlasted her by generations.
The earliest Shakers began gathering at the site now known as Mount Lebanon in seventeen eighty-two, and they built their first meetinghouse in seventeen eighty-five. The community was formally organized in seventeen eighty-seven under Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright, who together designed a gender-balanced governance structure unusual for the era: men and women held parallel leadership roles, controlling parallel aspects of community life.
Mount Lebanon became the Central Ministry of the entire Shaker movement. As communities spread across New England, New York, and eventually into Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, the elders at Mount Lebanon set doctrine, adjudicated disputes, and provided the movement's ultimate spiritual authority. At its peak in the mid-nineteenth century the Shaker world encompassed nearly twenty communities and some six thousand members.
What the Shakers left behind in material culture outlasted their theology. Their furniture, designed on the principle that making something well was itself an act of prayer, stripped every unnecessary ornament and let proportion and craft speak alone. That aesthetic influenced American design for a century after the last Shaker communities declined.
The seven remaining Shakers left Mount Lebanon in nineteen forty-seven. The site is a National Historic Landmark, and a museum preserves what the Central Ministry left behind.
