Back in the 1950s, Jimmie Campbell, an engineering student at the University of Kentucky, used to drive regularly from Lexington down U.S. Highway 68 to visit his sister in Danville. He became thoroughly acquainted on these trips with every curve on that narrow road, including the series of tight turns dropping down to the Kentucky River at the Jessamine-Mercer county line and its counterpart series across the river, climbing up again and onto the rolling Mercer County plateau. A few miles farther on from the river, Campbell would come to a special landmark on his forty-mile drive—a low stone fence, in need of some repairs but distinctive nevertheless, that marked the beginning of the lands surrounding the most unusual village in the entire Central Kentucky area—the old settlement called Shakertown, after the members of the remarkable religious sect that had established it early in the nineteenth century. A 1904 guidebook to the Bluegrass spoke of the village as “the home of the most peculiar people on the face of the globe.”
Approaching the village itself, young Campbell would pass a large square building on his left that seemed to be serving as a silo, stuffed with hay. Then, knowing the road, he would slow down a bit because a sharp curve would put him right in the village. Driving past several big brick and stone buildings—“all of them looked like boxes”—he would pass, on the left, one that was used as an inn. He never stopped there. Although he went on to have a distinguished career as a civil servant in Lexington (including, on his retirement, having a street named after him), his budget in those days had little room, he said, for eating at restaurants. For Campbell, Shakertown was, at best, a place to get an occasional few gallons of gas at the little Shell station.
Apparently he missed quite a dining adventure; another visitor to Shakertown in that era enjoyed better luck. Dick DeCamp, who spent a good bit of time in Lexington in the late 1950s and moved to the city in 1960, recalled that he and his friends “all used to go down to Shakertown and eat when the Renfrews ran the restaurant. The place had a lot of character. It was like something out of a Faulkner novel, going there for dinner. They just had some tables around and the old shades were on the windows.” It was a bring-your-own-bottle operation, DeCamp said, and the food was wonderful. “They just had a few things—a special eggplant casserole and fried chicken and old ham, but they’d never get it ready.” Guests would sit out on the front steps and “kill a bottle of whiskey,” and finally a member of the party would stroll back into the kitchen and casually ask, “How’re things coming, Mrs. Renfrew?” The lady would look up at her interlocutor from her cup of tea, “but it wasn’t tea.” Finally everybody would get fed, and then somebody would wind up the old Victrola in the corner and put on a record, and sometimes a waitress would join in the dancing. Those who, like Jimmie Campbell, just drove through Shakertown had no idea of the delights they were missing.
DeCamp also remembered the filling station, with its old-style pumps out front. It was in one of the larger old buildings that also housed a country store. A frame building along the street, between the inn and the general store, bore the sign: SHAKERTOWN BAPTIST CHURCH. One of the buildings was painted “a hideous brown,” one observer said, and a number of the others were covered with fake red brick paper. Some of them had porches and lean-tos that obviously had been added long after the original construction. Old cars sprawled outside a repair shop, and the Shaker graveyard presented a thicket of cane and brush. Banks of wires stretched between utility poles, and advertising signs hung from some of the buildings.
The village of Shakertown may have had its gustatory charms, but all in all, as one woman said, “it was not much of an inspiring sight.” Looking at it in 1959 or 1960, you seemed to see just another Waco, as in Madison County, or Little Rock, as in Bourbon County, or Salvisa, as in Mercer County—except for those big buildings. For however it may have looked, Shakertown was not a typical Kentucky farm village. Behind the buildings lining Highway 68—those unusual buildings doing ordinary duty as the inn and the church and the general store—stood others, large buildings of stone and brick, many of them boarded up, some dilapidated but others seeming eminently sound, thanks to their obviously solid construction. That, together with their location close to a well-traveled highway, probably accounted for their having survived weather and vandalism through the years relatively intact, solid evidence of a past far greater than the present. “Where nineteenth-century travelers on horseback had been startled by such immense structures,” one writer observed, “twentieth-century motorists passed by and wondered at the incongruous buildings.” In a way, Shakertown, a village sitting in the shadow of an earlier civilization, resembled a Karnak or a Troy with a pair of Shell pumps. “You could get a sense of what it had been,” one person remembered, “and what it could be.”
“There was always much talk,” said DeCamp, “about ‘what’s going to happen to that wonderful village?’”—the wonderful village lying beneath the humdrum, commercial, twentieth-century surface. Such talk had been heard, one way or another, for more than forty years. Shakertown had ceased functioning as a religious community in 1910, and just a few years later an exotic story had spread through the area. It seemed that the newly founded House of David, a religious group as out of the ordinary as the Shakers, had expressed interest in buying Pleasant Hill, which the members apparently considered a suitable spot in which to await the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, an event believed to be imminent. But nothing came of this possibility, or of the prophecy, and the House of David went on to win its greatest renown in the years between the world wars as the sponsor of a traveling baseball team each of whose members, in a decidedly clean-shaven era, sported a flowing beard.
During the Depression, talk was heard of turning Pleasant Hill into a state park, but that led nowhere either. Meanwhile, the last of the local Shakers had died, and a Harrodsburg businessman that had acquired the rights to the village and the surrounding farmlands sold the property at auction. The buildings changed hands many times during the ensuing decades, and from time to time in the 1940s and 1950s people discussed the possibility of restoring the village. In 1960, six persons owned the buildings in the village, with the neighboring farms in the hands of five owners.
Shortly after the end of World War II, Burwell Marshall, a Louisville lawyer who owned some of the buildings, had formed plans to open the village for visitors, but he and two brothers, George and Herbert Gwinn, who held most of the farmland surrounding the village, could never reach an agreement on a right-of-way to bring water from the pumping station across the farms and to the village itself. The Gwinns, however, had made an important contribution to the area in the realm of land conservation. By the time the Pleasant Hill community was dissolved in 1910, the land had suffered from long neglect, with orchards abandoned, rock fences tumbled, and topsoil in many places washed away “down to the clay.” In the 1930s the Gwinns, with their father, had begun acquiring various tracts, ending with a total of 1,921 acres, on which they had established a flourishing cattle-grazing and tobacco operation. Thanks to their strong sense of stewardship, the surrounding farmlands were in far better shape than the village itself.
In any case, the cost of a true restoration would be enormous, and the level of organization such a task demanded seemed beyond reach. Even a warning note sounded in March 1956, when fire gutted one of the original stone buildings, could not hasten action. So was the “wonderful village” simply doomed to perish through decay, accompanied perhaps by further commercialization? It certainly seemed that way. Saving it, everybody agreed, would be a tall order, and it would call for finding the answers to a number of questions. How would such a project repay the time and effort it would require? Should the buildings be preserved for their own sake, or was it the ideas and culture of the builders that would make the restoration of Pleasant Hill worth all the effort it would demand? Or should such a project have higher aspirations?
First: Who were the Shakers and what did they have to do with the people of Central Kentucky?