Shaker Agriculture (6/12/2026)

Posted on by

For the past two weeks the Friday Footnote has been exploring the agricultural education programs in New Hampshire. Before we leave the state, we need to make one more stop – the Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire.

But first, let’s start with a bell ringer. For the non-teachers who might be reading this — a bell ringer is a short, independent activity assigned to students the moment they enter a classroom. It typically takes only a few minutes and is designed to transition students into “school mode.”

The object below was fashioned and used at the Canterbury Shaker Village as a part of their farming operation. What is it?

The answer will appear in the closing remarks at the end of this Footnote.

Who are the Shakers?

The Shakers of New Hampshire were among the most fascinating religious communities in early American history. Officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers combined deep religious devotion with disciplined labor, communal living, and remarkable agricultural innovation. Their villages became known not only for spiritual purity and orderly lifestyles, but also for highly productive farms and practical inventions that helped shape American agriculture in the nineteenth century.

The Shaker movement began in England during the eighteenth century under the leadership of Ann Lee, later called Mother Ann Lee by her followers. Persecuted for their unusual religious beliefs, the group immigrated to America in 1774. The Shakers believed in equality between men and women, pacifism, confession of sins, celibacy, and communal ownership of property. Because they practiced celibacy, they relied on converts and orphan adoption to grow their communities. Their worship services were emotional and energetic, often including singing, dancing, trembling, and shaking motions that eventually gave rise to the nickname “Shakers.”

Figure 1. A Shaker Dance. Notice the separation of men and women. Shaker buildings had two entrance doors and two sets of stairs; one for men, one for women. Notice the men and women sitting separately.

The Shakers established two communities in New Hampshire: Canterbury in 1792, and Enfield, which followed in 1793 on the shore of Mascoma Lake. For more than a century these villages were among the most prosperous and admired farming enterprises in the state, and their reputation rested not only on their distinctive theology but on the quality of the crops, seeds, and remedies that flowed from their fields.

Canterbury was carefully planned and highly organized. The village included meeting houses, workshops, barns, mills, gardens, and living quarters arranged with great precision and cleanliness. Men and women lived separately but worked cooperatively, reflecting the Shaker belief that spiritual life required order, discipline, and equality.

To learn more about the Canterbury Shaker Village it is worth your time to view the 25 minute YouTube video listed in the references. This would be a good video to show students and get their reactions.

Figure 2. The Canterbury Shaker Village today. There were over 100 buildings at one time.

The Importance of Agriculture to the Shakers

The daily life in the Shaker community focused on work. The Shakers took the idea of labor and turned it into something almost holy. A saying handed down from their founder, Mother Ann Lee states, “Put your hands to work, and your hearts to God.”

To a Shaker, a sloppy fence wasn’t just a sloppy fence. It was a spiritual failure. A weed-choked garden was a sin against order. They swept their barns. They lined up their rows arrow-straight. Visitors would come up those New Hampshire hills and just… stare. Because everything was clean. Everything was exact. This was at a time when most New England farms were a muddy, improvised scramble for survival.

As converts entered the Shaker order at Canterbury, they often contributed land, animals, tools, and farming expertise, allowing the village to expand rapidly from its early holdings into a substantial agricultural property. By the early nineteenth century the community had accumulated large tracts of farmland, pasture, woodland, orchards, gardens, and mill sites. By 1850 the Canterbury Shakers were managing 3,000 acres.

The land supported a broad range of agricultural activities. The Shakers raised grains, vegetables, and fruit; maintained dairy herds and other livestock; managed hay fields and pastures; and used forest resources for fuel, building materials, and the support of village industries. Farming was therefore not merely one occupation among many. It was the essential foundation of Shaker self-sufficiency, enabling the village to feed its members, sustain related crafts and manufactures, and produce surpluses for sale in regional markets. In this sense, the agricultural landscape of Canterbury was both an economic system and a moral landscape, shaped by ideals of stewardship, discipline, and collective responsibility.

Contributions to Agriculture

One of the Shakers’ most important agricultural contributions was their emphasis on efficiency and innovation. They constantly searched for better farming methods and improved tools. Shaker farmers adopted crop rotation techniques to preserve soil fertility, carefully managed manure and compost, and maintained exceptionally clean barns and dairies. Their farms became models of productivity and organization at a time when many American farms still relied on traditional methods passed down informally through generations.

Garden Seeds

The Shakers’ single greatest contribution to agriculture was their pioneering role in the commercial garden-seed business. Before the Shakers, seeds were generally sold in bulk, by the barrel or the bushel, and a home gardener had little assurance of quality or freshness. The Shakers transformed this trade by packaging seeds in small, labeled paper packets sold individually to ordinary gardeners—an innovation that effectively created the retail seed industry as Americans came to know it.

Figure 3. Packages of Seeds from the Enfield Shaker Colony, NH.

The Canterbury and Enfield communities were active in this enterprise, growing, harvesting, and packaging seeds and then distributing them across the region. Shaker brethren traveled established routes by wagon, restocking the wooden seed boxes they placed in country stores and collecting payment on their return. Because the Shakers staked their reputation on honesty and reliability, their seeds became a byword for quality. Buyers trusted that a Shaker packet contained fresh seed of the variety promised, and that trust built a loyal market. In an age of frequent adulteration and fraud, the Shaker insistence on integrity was itself an agricultural reform, raising the standard for the entire trade.

Figure 4. Boxes like this were used in stores to sell Shaker seeds.

Herbs

Herb cultivation was another important aspect of Shaker agriculture. The Canterbury Shakers grew medicinal herbs such as peppermint, sage, lavender, and valerian, which they dried, processed, and sold commercially.

The Shakers gathered or cultivated some 200 varieties of herbs; dried, chopped, and pressed them into “bricks”; wrapped, labeled, and sold them to pharmacists and physicians world-wide. Tons of solid and fluid extracts also were produced. The Shaker label was recognized for reliability and quality for more than a century.

At a time when herbal medicine played a major role in health care, Shaker herb products became widely known for their reliability and purity. The herb industry provided important income for the community while also encouraging careful agricultural experimentation and specialization.

If you are near New Lebanon, NY on June 21, 2026 there is a workshop on Shaker Herbs and the Medicinal Garden from 2-4 PM at 5 Abode Road. The cost is $40.

Figure 5. Left – A shaker elixir, Center – book available from Amazon,
Right – Painting by Robert Thom titled The Shakers and Medicinal Herbs from the Hanneman Archive.

Plant Breeding

The Shakers developed several heirloom varieties of fruit including the Mount Lebanon grape, the Ohio Everbearing black raspberry, the Austin Seedling Strawberry, and Shaker Pippin apple (Weidman, 2013). [Curators Note: Weidman’s article focused on the efforts of Darryl Thompson, known as the Shaker Sleuth, to track down lost Shaker fruit varieties. Darryl’s father was hired in 1958 to help manage the Canterbury Village. At the time Darryl was 18 months old and only 13 sisters were still living in the Canterbury Village. Over the next 30 years Darryl lived at the village off and on and the remaining sisters treated him like a son. He also gives tours with his first hand knowledge of life in the Shaker Village.)

Closing Remarks

The Shakers also manufactured baskets and chairs that were known for their simplicity and clean design. They also made improvements to or invented the circular saw, flat brooms, washing machines, condensed milk, rotary harrow, metal ink pens, tilting chair, and even a Shaker Lemon pie (also known as the Ohio Lemon Pie).

The leather device featured at the start of this Footnote was a Bull Blinder. When the Shakers wanted to move a bull to a different location, they didn’t want the bull to be distracted by another bull or an amorous cow. So they designed this device to cover the head of the bull so that he could not see where he was going or get distracted.

In 1993 Laura Paine wrote an article in HortTechnology about the Shaker seed industry. An illustration in the article showed the locations of the Shaker colonies. The illustration is reproduced below with some slight modifications. According to Google the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Colony in Maine still has a few inhabitants. Since the Shakers practiced celibacy, the various villages slowly died out. However, their contributions to agriculture still live on. If you get a chance you should visit a restored Shaker village or museum.

Figure 6. From Paine, Laura (1993). Hands to Work, Hearts to God: The Story of the Shaker Seed Industry. HortTechnology. Volume 3, Issue 4, Oct/Dec.

References