A vanishing Maine religious sect wants its teachings to survive

NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine — Old building expert Arron Sturgis of Preservation Timber Framing spotted Shaker Village Director Michael Graham walking across the more than two-century-old religious community’s campus on Thursday morning.

“Are you ready for this?” Sturgis shouted.

Graham flashed two thumbs up.

A worker from Geddes Building Mover pulled a series of levers controlling 10 huge hydraulic jacks placed under the 200-year-old herb house — and then the 40-by-80-foot building began to rise. By the end of the day, a crew of skilled house movers had raised the impressive, 104-ton building nearly 10 feet off its granite foundation.

The gap will allow other workers to get started on transforming the historic, white clapboard structure into a modern, accessible cultural and community center which will help radiate the Sabbathday Shakers’ message of pacifism, love, hard work and self-acceptance into a distant future when there may be no Shakers left to spread it themselves.

“We’ve been here 200 years but there are still misunderstandings as to who we are and what we stand for,” said Brother Aronold Hadd, a member of the community. “We’re not the Amish. Shakers have always been progressive. We even had the first automobile in town.”

The Shakers are an egalitarian, communal Christian sect founded in England around 1747 and then organized in the United States in the 1780s. The New Gloucester community began in 1783.

But Shakers are also celibate and new adherents must come to the faith as adults. At their height, around the year 1800, almost 150 members lived in the New Gloucester village. By the 1930s, there were fewer than 50.

Now, there are only two — and the Sabbathday Lake village is the last Shaker community in the world.

However, even if no one else joins the sect, the new herb house community and cultural center will help make sure Shaker teachings live on into the future. It will retain its role as a mail-order herb processing center, which is the Shakers’ main business. But the building will also house art studios, classrooms, a teaching kitchen and community meeting space.

Graham, who is not a Shaker but has helped run the community for more than 30 years, said many people focus too much on how many members remain, rather than focussing on the group’s simple, communal and spiritual way of life.

To that end, Graham said visitors will be welcome to stop in and watch as herbs are dried and processed.

“And if you stand too long, you’ll be asked to help,” Graham said. “We want people to get involved. It’s a powerful experience.”

The building’s large kitchen will be available as a food business incubator and laboratory, too. There will be no charge, Graham said.

“All we ask is that people be available to stop, talk and teach people about what they’re doing, he said. “Just as the Shakers have been doing here since the 1960s.”

It was that kind of low-key Shaker outreach and kindness that drew Graham to the village in the first place. As a Bates College student in the 1990s, he visited the New Gloucester village while working on an anthropology project with a group of classmates. After interviewing several brothers and sisters, he asked to use the phone to call a cab for the $40 ride back to Lewiston.

When Sister Frances Carr overheard, she saw to it that they all got a ride home, free of charge. Her kind deed of faith-in-action still moves Graham to tears recalling it today.

“It changed my life,” he said, trying in vain to hold back tears.

After he graduated college, the Shaker community hired Graham as director of its public-facing operations, and he’s been there ever since.

As the workers toiled in the hot sun, and a crowd of about three dozen people watched from the shade of a few trees on Thursday, Dianne Devonshire, 81, operated the Shakers’ gift and herb shop.

Devonshire also cherishes a personal story of Shaker kindness.

Her family has a camp on the nearby lake and she remembers first visiting the shakers at age 13 in the early 1950s. Devonshire was learning to knit at the time and had run into a technical problem. One of the sisters noticed her struggling and offered to help.

“She was lovely, caring and kind — and they still are,” Devonshire said. “That seems amazing in a world which can feel devoid of those things sometimes.”

As the workers broke for lunch, with the herb house already more than five feet in the air, Hadd, one of the two remaining shakers was beaming.

“This feels amazing,” he said. “Brother Ted first had this idea in the 1970s but we didn’t have the funding.”

The current herb house project carries a $4.3 million price tag. It’s the largest construction project ever undertaken by the Sabbathday Lake Shakers. It’s being funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as individuals and businesses.

Graham said future fundraising and building plans will include a cafe and other public-facing programs designed to help get the larger community involved with the village, while dispelling the long-held misconception that Shakers shun outsiders and the modern world.

“We’re going to shift that misconception,” he said.

At the same time, he’s dedicated to making sure the village, its farm and herb business — plus the Shaker ideals of kindness, love and hard work — remain vital for decades to come.

“Those have been the hands-on, bedrock principles of this place for two centuries,” Graham said.