On Wednesday evening, August 9, 1961, in a meeting of the Blue Grass Trust at the Hunt-Morgan House, Bob Jewell announced the formation of a nonprofit corporation to preserve, restore, and use the village of Pleasant Hill. The group would acquire the buildings and land and would “maintain the property in such a manner as to reveal the original beauty, utility, and strength of the structures, and the simplicity of the life lived by the Shakers.” The group would also, he said—faithfully reporting the McLain-influenced decisions of the Shakertown committee—“utilize the property and facilities in such a manner as to improve the quality of contemporary life.” More specifically, it would restore the village so that it represented Shaker life and culture of a century earlier, and it would institute a varied program of cultural, educational, and recreational activities, with seminars, conferences, festivals, and tours. This child of the Blue Grass Trust, now striking out on its own, would be called Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Inc.; the members of the Shakertown committee became the organizing board of the new corporation. (The double name, combining the familiar designation of the village with the traditional Shaker name for it, was suggested by McLain.) The incorporators were Hilary Boone, Juliette Brewer, Dorothy Clay, Charles Graves, Lucy Graves, Bob Houlihan, Bob Jewell, Harry Tucker, Earl D. Wallace, and Retta Wright.
The plan won enthusiastic endorsements on all sides. Governor Bert Combs, who generally supported educational and cultural activities and sometimes had funds to contribute to them, declared that he had “complete and unqualified” enthusiasm for the idea of preserving this “priceless historical entity.” The area’s newspapers loved it. The Lexington Herald said editorially that “no project that has been suggested in recent years could be of greater value to Central Kentucky than the proposal to restore historic Shakertown”; it could be a “tourist attraction that, properly developed, will return millions of dollars to Kentucky in the years ahead.” It could even mean that “Kentucky would have a tourist attraction second only to restored Williamsburg, Va., one of the nation’s outstanding attractions of a bygone era.” The Lexington Leader, the Herald’s Republican afternoon sister, though a bit less rhapsodic, endorsed McLain’s ideas about the constructive use of Shakertown as a justification for the expenditure of time and money that would be required to preserve it, and considered the plan an opportunity for Kentucky to acquire “a tremendous asset to the Blue Grass and the whole state, and a place of interest to the entire nation.”
Jane Bird Hutton of the Harrodsburg Herald of course gave the project complete editorial support, expressing special approval for the aim of restoring Shakertown as a “living village,” which, she said, had some years ago been the thought of a local citizen, the late Colonel James L. Isenberg. Striking her familiar theme of the job opportunities the restoration would offer, she declared: “We have a gold mine in our county. Let us not fail to see that everything is done by us to assure the program.”
No one will be surprised to learn that the Courier-Journal applauded Governor Combs’s complete and unqualified enthusiasm. “To this,” the paper said, “we add an amen.” The editorial offered specific congratulations to Bob Jewell and Hilary Boone, as the leaders of the group of Central Kentuckians who were proposing the restoration. Few newspaper readers could know what thought and labor and what endless meetings lay behind Bob Jewell’s announcement. Few could realize what an act of faith it still represented.
Several months earlier, though poor in both cash and property, the Shakertown committee had decided on another act of faith. To keep things moving in coordination, the members of the group agreed, the developing project must find an executive director. Though anybody who accepted the job would indeed have to be a person of remarkable optimism and faith, the committee at least had front money to offer: the members and a number of close friends had proved their dedication to Shakertown by putting up the needed cash themselves; in the last three months of 1960, five persons had contributed a total of $10,849, headed by $5,000 from Dorothy Clay and $3,000 from Lucy Graves. The committee also proposed to seek “Founding Sponsors” who would underwrite the expenses of the first two years of operation, estimated to total $60,000; this fund, intended as a short-run, maintenance operation, was seen as separate from the long-range capital fund, which would be built up through a proposed five-year development program, with $1 million as the goal. Despite the talk of such big numbers, anybody coming from very far away to take the director’s job would have to have at least some gambling instincts or, perhaps, enjoy independent means.
By spring the committee had put lines out to a varied group of candidates, some of them suggested by the director of the National Trust. In late April, Raymond McLain, who served as a sort of roving consultant to Pleasant Hill, discussed the situation at a lunch meeting in New York with a Wall Street financier who had become interested in the Shakertown project. Unlike McLain, the financier had no particular admiration for the Shakers themselves, whom he considered a group of bizarre misfits, but those great buildings and the challenge of saving them constituted another matter.
The two men agreed that it might take considerable time to find a person who could be effective both as a fund-raiser and as executive director—these being the two chief aspects of the job as they saw it at the time. The group should, however, move quickly to choose a president of Pleasant Hill, McLain said, because of “the reluctance of people to give unless they know who is going to be responsible for the planning of the project and its financial soundness.” The financier, Earl Wallace, offered an interesting—and, in the light of later events, amusing—reply to this observation: everybody appreciated the need to find a president, he said, but “we are unable to think of anyone acceptable who might take it.” One way or the other, however, if Pleasant Hill was to gather support it needed to have on board the people who were going to run the project.
Though now spending his working time in Manhattan, Earl Wallace was a native of Knox County, Kentucky, and at heart a thorough Lexingtonian. Sixty-two years old and moving toward semiretirement, he commuted weekly from Lexington, where his family lived, to New York and the offices of the investment bankers Dillon, Read and Company at 15 William Street in lower Manhattan—the firm he had joined after spending thirty years in the oil business.
Wallace had certainly not gone through life carrying any torch for Shakertown, but during his years at the University of Kentucky, like many another university blade of the time, he had discovered a particular charm of the village. In those days the inn was located in the East Family House and the tearoom “served marvelous food. A wonderful Sunday dinner—I think it cost a dollar. We tried to save our money to take girls there if we could find a car.” (But “I had never heard anyone refer to it as Pleasant Hill,” Wallace later said, in expressing his agreement with the idea of keeping the popular name for the sake of local identification.)
In March 1961 the Pleasant Hill personnel search had taken a strange turn. When Richard Howland, the former president of the National Trust, had come to the Blue Grass to advise on the feasibility of the restoration, his personality and ideas had exerted a galvanic effect on the committee. The day after Howland left, Barry Bingham, on behalf of the group, wrote him that he had made “converts among those who had really only come along with the program out of friendship for the chief participants, or a sense of public obligation.” Now, said Bingham, everybody had become “warmly enthusiastic and eager to move ahead. As to those who were already zealous in the cause, they have been given a greatly increased faith in the practicality of the project, and a renewed determination to make it succeed.” So dazzled had the group been that Bingham went on to offer Howland the job of executive director of the Shakertown organization-to-be. Obviously this was a long shot, indeed, in view of Howland’s eminence in the field and his new, and presumably secure, position at the Smithsonian. But, said Bingham, the committee could not resist making the offer “in the hope that a near miracle might make it possible for you to agree to do it.” (No miracle was in the offing. He was “completely surprised and very touched,” Howland said, by this “tribute that was indeed heartwarming.” But even Bingham’s elegant blandishments could not lure him away from the Smithsonian.)
Just a few days after this exchange, Bingham found himself on the receiving end of another proposition—or he would have had Hilary Boone decided to mail a certain letter. In this letter Boone told Bingham that, since the time had come to form a separate Shakertown organization, the group “unanimously and deeply” felt that Bingham should become general chairman of the entire project. This proposal formed part of an organizational plan in which Bingham would cast his aura over Louisville, Cincinnati, and Central Kentucky and a vice chairman would serve as the actual executor of the committee’s policies. Obviously, operating with such a structure could raise practical questions, but bagging Bingham as the lead lion of the organization would have constituted a notable coup. If the two dreams could have been combined, Bingham, Howland, and the vice chairman, whoever he might have been, would certainly have made up a potent executive team, but it was not to be. So Shakertown did not yet have either a president or an executive director; even so, the project was not fated to suffer from a lack of leadership.
Though Shakertown did not yet have a president, the executive directorship question seemed to have been settled when, in July, the Shakertown committee chose Ralph McCallister, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for the post. A distinguished-looking man in his fifties, tall and gray-haired, McCallister was an acquaintance of Raymond McLain’s and came to the project from long experience as vice president and director of program and education at Chautauqua, visiting lecturer in the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University, and director of the Adult Education Council of Chicago. This background suggested both that McCallister had leadership experience and that he had the kind of knowledge that fitted him to carry out McLain’s concerns about program activities at Pleasant Hill.
McCallister, who was to be paid $10,000 a year plus a housing allowance of $200 a month, would be joined on the fledgling Pleasant Hill staff by Betty Morris, whose cousin, Bob Jewell, had urged her to give up her staff position at the Red Cross and help out with Shakertown full-time; she was hired as McCallister’s assistant at $250 a month. They would work in two rooms in Hilary Boone’s Massachusetts Mutual office at 2200 Young Drive, in the east end of Lexington; Boone gave them a break on the rent, charging $50 a month, about half of the going price, though one room would be shared with the Blue Grass Trust (perhaps, McCallister thought, the Trust might be willing to contribute $12.50 to the rent; either way it was a complex little situation, with Boone as the chairman of the Trust, about-to-be treasurer of Pleasant Hill, and benign landlord). By late July the office had begun functioning.
Though the Courier-Journal had singled out Boone and Bob Jewell for its editorial praise, the “temporary chairman” of the incorporating group was Earl Wallace. Not a member of the original committee, Wallace nevertheless had his own interest in historic landmarks, having been the inspirer and donor of the first such plaque in Lexington, at Ashland, Henry Clay’s estate; it was put up in 1937, and Wallace had even composed its text. Because he was still working in New York, flying up on Monday morning and back on Friday evening, he had only limited time for activities in Lexington. But a close friend, Harry St. George Tucker, owner of the Taylor Tire Company in Lexington and a member of the Shakertown committee, asked Wallace to accompany him to one of the group’s regular meetings, which were held on Saturday mornings.
No sooner had Wallace joined the committee, it seemed, than he was chosen for the top spot. “At one of those meetings, I probably opened my mouth and said too much and they made me chairman,” Wallace once said by way of explanation. But his selection had little surprising about it: the principal problem—often, indeed, the only problem—facing the incorporators was money and how to get it, and even though several of them had enjoyed success in businesses of various kinds, Wallace brought with him the luster of Wall Street. He had also held high executive posts, including a vice presidency of Standard Oil of Ohio. When he proved willing to take on the challenge of the so-called temporary chairmanship, that settled it. Bob Jewell later recalled having felt some surprise, however; he had thought that “this man is too smart to take hold of this business.” But take hold Wallace did, so thoroughly that from then on, whatever title others might hold, he would be the true CEO.
Three days after the announcement of the new corporation, at a meeting of the incorporators, Wallace began by proposing a resolution recognizing that “the inspiration for this group to undertake to save Shakertown originated with Joseph C. Graves.” The resolution as adopted declared that the organization “to secure, improve, preserve and properly use” Pleasant Hill—note all four points—had come into being as a direct result of Graves’s influence.
The Courier-Journal ’s expression of editorial approval represented only the paper’s initial response to Jewell’s August 9 announcement. On the following Sunday, readers were told, the paper’s magazine supplement would carry a major feature on Shakertown—three pages of color pictures, a story by a leading reporter, and a number of aerial photos and other pictures. When the story appeared, it did indeed cover the subject in encyclopedic detail. Obviously long in the preparation, the coverage had benefitted from detailed help given by Burwell Marshall, who had “always been interested in” the restoration of Shakertown, the paper noted, and now hoped to sell his property to the new organization (as the paper did not note). It was also obvious that Barry Bingham’s interest in a subject translated into thorough coverage by the Courier-Journal’s staff, even if, despite his heavy involvement in the project for the past four years, the boss took care not to appear in the coverage himself.
Observing that it was “high time some organization took action to preserve the stately old Shaker buildings with their double entrances,” the reporter, Gerald Griffin, warned that “after withstanding the ravages of time and the elements, some of them are being destroyed by man.” He went on to paint a compelling picture of Pleasant Hill’s needs, history, and possibilities. The story was timed to appear with a new kind of event: only four days after Jewell’s announcement, not wasting a moment, the Pleasant Hill group was hosting a Sunday open house at Shakertown, from three to six in the afternoon. As Betty Morris remembered it, the prime mover in this project was Juliette Brewer, “one of the greatest entrepreneurs since P. T. Barnum.” Wife of Lawrence Brewer, a University of Kentucky agriculture professor who also operated a horse-feed business, Mrs. Brewer had led the campaign to preserve Henry Clay’s law office in downtown Lexington and had served in other preservation efforts. “The one thing I always said about Mrs. Brewer,” noted Dick DeCamp, who later directed the Blue Grass Trust, “was that if she wanted a table moved, she got on the other end and helped move it. She was like all the ladies—they all wanted their own way. She was strong-willed, but I always admired her.” A Mercer County native, Mrs. Brewer wanted no delay in showing off Shakertown, even though the new organization did not own a single square foot of it. Here again, Burwell Marshall cooperated, this time by making the Centre Family House and two other buildings available for the party. Volunteer hostesses would display drugs and medicines, seed boxes, bonnet forms, looms, and kettles from Marshall’s collection of Shaker objects.
“Mrs. Brewer came to me,” Betty Morris recalled, “and said, ‘We’re going to have lemonade, and I’ve brought you these six pitchers.’” That, with several cans of frozen lemonade, seemed adequate-enough preparation for the hundred or so guests expected for a little open house out in the country, until the cars began coming. “The lemonade wound up in Mrs. Kurtz’s country store in the freezer,” Mrs. Morris said, “because we didn’t have a minute to open it.” Some two thousand people crowded into the village that Sunday afternoon, and a number of others tried to stop but had to keep going on Highway 68 because they couldn’t find places to park.
On the following Sunday, with fifteen members of the Harrodsburg group serving as hostesses for a second open house, Pleasant Hill greeted more than three thousand visitors, who heard talks from the hostesses on the uses of the buildings and the habits of the Shakers. “Visitors are not satisfied with just a look inside the three buildings open for inspection,” said Sterling Tapp, who had been chosen as president of the Mercer County committee affiliated with Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Inc. “Interest is so great they want to roam the grounds and take a look at all the buildings.”
“We were overwhelmed,” Ralph McCallister said, but local merchants expressed delight at the crowds for the open houses. Robert Renfrew said that the inn enjoyed a tremendous increase in business, and even a restaurant at Brooklyn Bridge on the Kentucky River, several miles away, reported the biggest crowds for a number of years. Such success encouraged Earl Wallace to announce that the open houses would continue through early November.
Not everybody was thrilled with the unrestored state of Shakertown, however. At one of the open houses, young women from a Harrodsburg high school sorority served as hostesses, with each one stationed at each main door or on each floor to greet visitors and open and shut doors. “The buildings were dusty and deserted,” one of the members remembered, “with no lighting except what came in through the windows, and one of the main buildings had hay in it.” When she went to leave her building, the other girl stationed there refused to remain by herself, and left, too. She found it just too spooky, “particularly in the late afternoon.”
On September 1, Mercer Countians came together in a mass meeting to plan a local fund drive, setting themselves a quota of $40,000—a small percentage of the totals that had been discussed for the project but an impressive figure for a small town at a time when cash had only slowly appeared on the Shakertown scene. A representative of the Kentucky Department of Economic Development came to town to explain the value of the proposed project to the economy of Mercer and surrounding counties. Soon a twenty-foot-high thermometer had sprouted on a downtown street, and almost immediately the mercury rose from zero to $1,000 ($39,000 to go, observed the Herald jauntily), and then it leapt to $5,500. Having firmly committed themselves in every way to the project, the Harrodsburg leaders did not prove shy about asking McCallister for “further details about the expectations from other areas.” How serious, for instance, was Fayette County?
Though program and not promotion was his primary interest, McCallister did his part to spread the word by speaking at every kind of club and function—in Harrodsburg, Lexington, Nicholasville, Berea, Versailles—and Friends of Shakertown groups were beginning to meet in several counties; Mrs. Edward Ray headed this effort. Keeping the autumnal events rolling, Shakertown at Pleasant Hill announced the first annual fall festival for October 5–8, featuring “Kentucky Treasures,” some of them Shaker pieces, others from Blue Grass collections—antiques, silver (including the service from the old battleship Kentucky), and china. On the meadow between the Centre and East Family Houses a country fair would present prizewinners from the state fair in Louisville. There would also be a flower show and a display of old guns (from Kentucky flintlocks to a Japanese matchlock) from a prominent private collection, and members of Homemakers clubs from three counties would bring canned products and handmade goods. The food for consumption on the spot sounded much more tempting than the 1888 Shaker fare: country ham sandwiches, homemade cake, and coffee. Mrs. Brewer would preside over the entire event as “general chairman.” Some of these features obviously had much less to do with the Shakers than others had, but all of them together served to focus attention on the project and its setting.
Governor Combs opened the festival by lifting a cord of flowers resembling a Hawaiian lei from the two doors—men’s and women’s—of the Centre Family House. Declaring that there was “no more interesting or romantic spot in the country” than Shakertown, the governor said that the restoration would help make Kentucky the country’s leading state for tourists. From then until the end of the four days, Jane Hutton roamed the grounds with her ears open for adjectives used by the visitors in talking about the experience: she noted unique, interesting, successful, amazing, terrific, fascinating, enjoyable, educational, entertaining, colossal. It all proved, she said, the existence of a great genuine interest in the Shakertown committee and its attempts to preserve and restore the Shaker community.
Mercer County managed to display its own interest in tangible form: by mid-October the temperature in the downtown thermometer had risen to $23,000 (in, of course, 1961 dollars). After the festival, Juliette Brewer reported that the affair had taken in $7,233.29; owing to the remarkably low overhead, the net profit was $6,269.77. The immediately important fact here was that this money could be applied to the first payment for Shakertown property.
As it happened, only ten days after Mrs. Brewer’s announcement the Pleasant Hill board exercised its option on the two tracts owned by the Kurtz family, agreeing to a price of $56,000. (At one point these negotiations, which had not been easy throughout their course, became so rough that Wallace told the trustees: “Perhaps those of the committee who have not taken part in the Kurtz negotiations would be in a better position to renew [them] and continue with or without Mr. McClure’s assistance.”) This move meant only that Pleasant Hill was contracting to buy the property, not that it was actually handing over money, but the action should, said Jane Hutton, put fresh impetus into the local fund drive. Some people, it seemed, had been holding back, waiting to see whether the committee really meant business—but, said Miss Hutton, “a contract to buy is serious business.” On December 16, in another piece of serious business, the Pleasant Hill trustees voted to exercise their option on thirty acres owned by Burwell Marshall—property that included the Centre Family House and the East Family House. This action could not really be called voluntary, however, since Marshall had sent Wallace a put-up-or-shut-up ultimatum.
Meanwhile, at a dinner that drew forty leading Lexingtonians, Wallace had announced a thirteen-day drive to raise $100,000 toward the purchase of the village. Such local notables as Fred B. Wachs, general manager of the Lexington newspapers; O. A. Bakhaus, a businessman and public official; and Emmett Milward, of the funeral home that was one of the city’s oldest businesses, had offered their help, with Harry Huether, former chairman of the board of the General Telephone Company, serving as chairman of the drive and Chloe Gifford of the University of Kentucky, former president of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, heading the women’s division of the campaign. Speaking at the dinner, Barry Bingham pledged full support from a Shakertown committee being formed in Louisville; Louisvillians were also being asked to put up $100,000 for the project. Just a few days earlier, Bingham had joined the Pleasant Hill board of trustees, together with Wachs, McLain, and a promising new player in the game, James L. Cogar, the former curator of Colonial Williamsburg, who had helped with the 1957 course in preservation and who was a native of the Blue Grass and a graduate of the University of Kentucky.
A month later, pushing for an ever larger board, with more citizens drawn into the action, Wallace announced the names of ten new trustees. Three were from Lexington—William H. Townsend, a lawyer widely known for his writings about Lincoln; Dr. Francis M. Massie, a surgeon; and Mrs. Clarkson Beard, a civic leader much involved in arts and education, but more came from outside Fayette County: Jane Bird Hutton and George Chinn were added from Mercer County; Mrs. William P. Caldwell and Enos Swain, editor of the Danville Advocate, from Boyle County; and Mrs. George W. Norton Jr. and Elbert Gary Sutcliffe from Louisville. The latter served as chairman of the Centre College board of trustees. Francis S. Hutchins, president of Berea College, rounded out the notable group.
Amid all this activity, November 4 had become a date to be preserved in the annals of Pleasant Hill. On this day, although preoccupied by fund-raising efforts, the Shakertown leaders demonstrated their allegiance to Raymond McLain’s principle of greater usefulness by staging their first event in the realm of ideas. This conference—“The Shaker Character: Does It Have Meaning for Today?”—brought together Edward Deming Andrews, curator of the Hancock Shaker Village at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, former professor of history at Yale, and an expert on Shaker furniture; Gerald Ham, who continued to serve Pleasant Hill as an adviser; and Captain Frank Owen, who had come from England to spend a month as consultant on education to the Shakertown project. A pioneer in residential adult education, Owen had made good use of his four years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese by developing for his fellow prisoners an educational program without benefit of books or writing materials, and since 1947 had served as principal of a residential college that he had started from scratch.
The effects of the conference do not lend themselves to easy assessment, aside from the obvious publicity value, but later comments on Pleasant Hill itself made by Owen to McLain, who was leaving again for Cairo, sounded a provocative note. “A true friend,” said the captain, “would point out to you the dangers of disunity as still remaining strong and needing to be guarded against by a greater readiness to compromise on inessentials of difference. Every new project has such dangers as each of its supporters presses for aims dear to himself.”
In passing Owen’s words on to the board of trustees, McLain urged the members to take them to heart, and he went on: “I would add only one comment: let us not fall into the fatal trap of questioning one another’s motives.” Every aspect of the plan, it seemed, had its advocates—educational activities, arts and crafts, tourist attractions. “I’m afraid I am getting preachy,” McLain said, “but the admonition for little children (which we all are) to ‘love one another’ comes as close as possible to a profound summation.” More mundanely, McLain added that, since “it is necessary to do things together if any group is to stay together in any many-sided and long-continued project,” the group had an easily chosen task before it: It must get the money to take up the options and buy the property. Otherwise, none of the discussion could have any real meaning.
McLain then went on to list what he saw as the needed practical fund-raising steps:
1. The board should set a target date for raising $100,000 (he suggested January 13, a “lucky number”); every board member should first make his own maximum gift; only then could the board then approach other prospective donors; McCallister should administer this effort—processing cards, securing progress reports from solicitors, and performing all the other necessary chores;
2. At the same time, McCallister should work with the existing solicitation efforts, with the downtown Lexington group, in Harrodsburg, and elsewhere;
3. A ruling on tax-exempt status should be secured from the IRS;
4. While taking these steps, the board should also employ a professional fund-raising firm to assume responsibility for the total campaign effort (McCallister had independently urged the same action); all experience showed, McLain said, the necessity of having professional guidance for achieving sizable financial goals—it was as necessary as professional advice for achieving the proper restoration of the property itself; counsel should be brought in immediately, to enable the mounting of a major effort to secure the entire fund.
Earl Wallace later characterized 1961 as “the beginning year” of Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, and a memorable year it had proved to be. No one could disagree with McLain’s injunction about the importance of raising money, but how well his suggested approach would work and how much money would be needed remained fundamental questions—and they might well represent only the beginning.