The original Owenites, a short-lived utopian community led by Robert Owen, lived in New Harmony, Indiana, in the early nineteenth century and had a lasting impact on American education. In 1825, at the Pleasant Hill Shaker village, a group of young Believers, influenced by the ideas of Robert Owen, agitated for reform. The result was a crisis in leadership and the apostasy of many Shakers.
However, the New-Owenites—along with the North Homage Shaker village, the town and the county of Languor, Kentucky, and all their inhabitants—are figments of the author’s imagination. The characters live only in this book and represent no one, living or dead. By the 1930s, the period in which this story is told, no Shaker villages remained in Kentucky or anywhere else outside the northeastern United States. Today one small Shaker community survives: Sabbathday Lake, near Poland Springs, Maine. The Pleasant Hill Shaker community (near Harrodsburg, Kentucky) and the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts have both been restored and are open to visitors who wish to see how Believers lived during the nineteenth century.
Deborah Woodworth
May 14, 1999