On May 31, 1964, two prominent friends of Pleasant Hill spoke at a ceremony marking the official beginning of the restoration. Bert Combs, who had now become a former governor, told the crowd of about two hundred that “the history of Shakertown can be used as a guide to help us build a progressive Kentucky.” People today had much to learn from the Shakers, Combs said, praising them for their industry, sobriety, fairness, cleanliness, and—in a limp attempt at a joke—for their belief that “women should stay silent unless they had something useful to say”; the remark came as a particularly odd comment from an experienced politician on a movement founded by a woman and governed by women in parity with men. Moving on to firmer ground, the former governor added an interesting specific item to the list of Shaker inventions, crediting the Believers with dreaming up the needle with one eye.
Raymond McLain struck the note that had characterized all his contributions to discussions about Pleasant Hill. The restored village would be “a key to serenity in the midst of the rush and demand that is constantly upon us.” Shakertown would become a retreat in which people of the present day could absorb the values that brought the settlement into existence (though, one might add, not all of the Shaker values, perhaps). Guests at the village could see “life pared of its superficialities, yet see that it can remain beautiful because it is strong and neat and not gaudy.” A few days afterward, Jim Cogar would express similar thoughts, telling a questioner: “The whole idea is to make it a cultural and educational center.” Though the village would offer visitors a beautiful experience and a fascinating look into a strange part of Kentucky’s past, Cogar expressed the hope that Pleasant Hill would win its greatest fame as a quiet place to solve the world’s problems.
At the opening ceremony, forty hostesses guided visitors through the buildings, which, along with a show of paintings by the Kentucky impressionist Paul Sawyier, featured a display of sturdy, functional Shaker-style tables and chairs. This furniture-making project started slowly, Cogar said, but it was about to pick up under the supervision of a new staff member, James Thomas, who had just come to Pleasant Hill. With the $80,000 made available from the EDA loan, Thomas had the particular responsibility of outfitting the buildings, making the needed furniture and accessories. “I trained some craftsmen that worked in a nonconforming building, since torn down,” Thomas said; this building, owned by a member of the Kurtz family, was a garage. “It had a concrete-block side and a frame side, and for the concrete-block side we outfitted it with finishing materials and on the frame side we outfitted it with machinery so that we could make the furniture and accessories.” Besides tables and chairs, the workmen would turn out beds, chests, candle stands, wooden coat hangers, and mirrors; hardware was reproduced in the mechanical maintenance shop headed by Carl Secchi. Thomas came to Pleasant Hill from Louisville, where he had worked on the restoration of Locust Grove, the home of George Rogers Clark, under the architect Walter Macomber, of Alexandria, Virginia, an old colleague of Jim Cogar’s from Colonial Williamsburg, and with his own brother, Sam Thomas. A native of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Jim Thomas at the age of fifteen “reluctantly” moved to Kentucky with his family, but by the next year his views had changed. He enjoyed his new classmates at Louisville Country Day, and when his father was transferred again, this time to Chicago, young Jim lasted for three days and then ran away from his new home, back to Louisville. After briefly attending the University of Louisville, Jim became “clerk of the works” at Locust Grove, where he and his brother also lived. Since very few persons had academic training in preservation in those days, Jim and Sam Thomas both learned the trade through on-the-job training.
On a visit to Louisville, Cogar met Thomas and, noting how he found the situation at Shaker Village reminiscent of the early days at Colonial Williamsburg, said he hoped that Thomas might join the project after finishing at Locust Grove. In an airport meeting in the summer of 1963 with Cogar and Earl Wallace, who was then commuting between Lexington and New York, Thomas was officially taken aboard; when he told the others that the arrangement was contingent on his work at Locust Grove being completed in 1964, Wallace commented that it was also contingent on Shakertown’s having some money from the ARA loan. Fortunately, that turned out to be the case, and further, “I was fortunate,” Thomas said, “to apprentice first under Walter Macomber and then under Jim Cogar, and I learned a tremendous amount from both.” Cogar was “a marvelous person in every way. He had a magnetic personality, and he was a wonderful raconteur—an old-fashioned Kentucky storyteller. He had magnificent taste—an innate sense of style and taste.”
Nora Belle Kurtz, whose family owned the country store and who presided at the Centre Family House during the May 31 restoration ceremony, was quite a story in herself. Betty Morris called her “the most delightful woman in the world,” and to Jim Thomas she was “a wonderful person.” He thought that, “growing up in the Depression, she had no advantages. She finished maybe the sixth or the eighth grade. But she was very smart and had a terrific work ethic.” She began her association with the Pleasant Hill group as a volunteer, but when the organization began functioning she became perhaps the first local employee, presiding over the one room of crafts set up in the Centre Family House and directing tourists through the building, which for some time was, at best, only semirestored. She would go on to run, very successfully, the Pleasant Hill gift shop, and later to hold a vice presidency.
On the day before the ceremony, commenting on the progress of the project, Earl Wallace said in an eruption of wild optimism that the trustees hoped “to have the major part of the restoration done by the end of 1965.” But the target date for opening the dining facilities and some of the guest rooms was even earlier, June 1965, just a year away. This represented an ambitious program, since no contracts would be let until late July or early August. As it turned out, quite a different schedule developed.
Having come from Colonial Williamsburg, where only one-sixth of the buildings stood as survivors from an earlier century, Jim Cogar brought a special perspective to his work in Mercer County. “The fascinating thing about Pleasant Hill,” he once observed, “was that the buildings were still here and were in surprisingly good condition, considering the years they had been abandoned or used for other purposes. You could see the handwriting on the wall very plainly—it was a village that should be restored.” Still, the degree of dilapidation and decay from which many of the buildings suffered meant that the restoration team faced daunting challenges, compounded by the less-than-ideal role forced on Cogar by the federal restrictions. The “excellence in everything” with which he credited the Shakers fitted exactly with his own drive for excellence, but with only limited authority over the workers on the job—and the number would grow to more than a hundred—he would have to draw on all his ingenuity to apply his dictum that “preservation is a science, not a haphazard affair.”
Although the center of operations remained for some time in the office on Young Drive in Lexington, Cogar had earlier opened a Pleasant Hill office on the second floor of the Centre Family House at the very back of the building. “Cold in winter and hot in summer, it was primitive,” he remembered. “People were still living there, including an elderly custodian on the floor below. We had a small shop in the basement of the East Family House, where we did most of the woodworking, making things needed in the repairs.” Using scraps of wood found in attics and workrooms, craftsmen repaired windows, doors, and interior moldings with the initial aim of furbishing the Centre Family House enough to make it attractive to tourists. “Mrs. Kurtz, who ran the family’s grocery, was a dynamo and was able to provide us with lunches as well as gasoline and ’most anything else we needed.” Cogar was not a “sit-down-at-the-desk type man,” Betty Morris said. “He ran things from walking around.”
Washington Reed, who had begun helping with the loan application during the previous year, complemented Cogar with his preservation experience. A “delightful, gentle person,” as Thomas remembered him, Reed and three other architects would spend two years making detailed drawings of the buildings, now reduced in the planning from twenty-seven to twenty, to be preserved and restored. Later, as inflationary pressures fueled by the Vietnam War built up, the number for the first phase of the restoration would be reduced to twelve and then to eight; the $2 million federal loan wouldn’t stretch as far as had been hoped and expected.
Cogar visualized in detail the village as it had appeared in the chosen Shaker days. He wanted all “nonconforming” buildings removed and practical signs of the twentieth century must be invisible: all wires and pipes installed must be tunneled through the massive foundations of the buildings; all outside utility pipes and wires must be buried. The sewage-disposal plant would be placed out of sight. Cogar’s contributions in working out the master plan for the adaptation of the buildings to functional uses were “of inestimable value in convincing government officials that Shakertown had the talent to make the most of the proceeds of the loan,” Wallace said. “Not only that, but he was a stickler for authenticity to the extreme practicable in the circumstances, in which I supported him completely, as did the trustees”—even though this support often had a painful price: “At times we could have saved several hundred thousand dollars by not hiding in the walls and the grounds such installations as ducts, conduits, pipes, and wires for utilities and air-conditioning.”
Overall, Cogar would carefully set the tone of the restoration. As a leading exponent of the idea of historic preservation as the capture of a moment in time, he represented the characteristic and best thought of his generation; thus at Pleasant Hill any features that came after about 1860 were removed from the scene. In later decades, many preservationists would move toward a different view, embracing the concept of showing change over time and thus tending to preserve features of buildings from different periods. This trend in preservationist fashion did not mean that Cogar had an incorrect or flawed philosophy; a restoration, like anything else, is, of course, a product of its era, and in their own moment in time the members of the Shakertown board, like Rockefeller at Williamsburg, seemed to favor the aesthetic appeal of seizing the single moment. They were, in a way, looking to the creation of a work of art.
Those who saw preservation from a more sociological or political viewpoint, and their number is said to have increased in the 1980s and 1990s, would incline to the evolutionary approach; this would certainly be true of self-styled radical historians like Michael Wallace, who was quoted on Williamsburg in chapter 4. This historian could, indeed, feel some justification in changes that have come to Williamsburg in later years, perhaps especially in the fence paint that is now allowed to flake and the horse droppings that now grace the streets. (This latter feature, however, does not guarantee greater psychological authenticity, since the impact of horse manure today is far different from its effect more than two centuries ago, when it was taken for granted as a feature of daily life.) With reference to the work at Shakertown, Jim Thomas observed that, in addition to buildings without a Shaker history that were removed, “there were some additions that were torn off or torn away back in the early sixties that would be retained today.”
Speaking in the year 2000, Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, offered a definition with elements that could provide support for various views: “Historic preservation is the business of saving special places and the quality of life they support. It has to do with more than bricks and iron and columns and cobblestones. It has to do with the way individuals, families and communities come together in attractive and supportive environments.”
In any case, Cogar’s unwavering commitment to excellence and his ability to work effectively within the federal restrictions would prove to be money in the bank, as Earl Wallace would find when he called on potential donors. Pleasant Hill’s status as a going concern, one respectable and even much admired, would earn him a different reception from the days when he had desperately sought funds for a project that, while it might sound worthwhile, existed partly on paper and mostly in talk and dreams. One donor, W. Rowell Chase, would very nicely say, “I first saw Shakertown in the early ’30’s, shortly after moving to Cincinnati from New England. At that time, it seemed to me to be an unusual town, and I could not understand why it was just sitting there deteriorating. I am glad that somebody else had more gumption than I to do something about it.”
When Cogar retired at the beginning of 1974, Wallace summed up his contribution: “The restored village is as much the handiwork of Jim Cogar as the original was the genius of Micajah Burnett.”
The next objective of Mr. Wallace and his associates is to buy nearly 2,000 acres of smiling Bluegrass farmland, entirely surrounding the village,” commented the Courier-Journal in its inevitable editorial applauding the ARA loan. “The purchase would forever protect Shakertown from vulgar and unsuitable intrusions of the modern world. This is vital insurance for the future.” This was precisely Jim Cogar’s view as well. “I had seen in Williamsburg what could happen,” Cogar said. “It becomes almost impossible to get the land you want—it’s hard to get and very expensive.”
Less than a month later, on February 2, Shakertown finally closed the long-mooted deal with the Gwinn brothers for their 1,921 acres of farmland, extending about a mile in all directions from the village. So efficiently had the Gwinns restored and managed the land during their tenure of more than twenty-five years that they now had one of the largest farming operations in the Blue Grass, with a tobacco yield of about 150,000 pounds and sometimes as many as a thousand head of cattle grazing the pastures. After some discussion, the Gwinns agreed to a price of $500 an acre, for a total of $963,000; the down payment would be $192,000. By now Shakertown, Inc., had a considerable history of making deals without any funds on hand, and the Gwinns could hardly have been surprised at Wallace’s request for a six-month period in which to raise the down payment. The purchasers’ lack of cash did not cast a shadow on the transfer ceremony, which took place on a bright, cold day in the field behind the West Family House Sisters’ Shop, a vantage point that gave a panoramic view of Pleasant Hill’s new acreage. Herbert Gwinn presented the deed to Earl Wallace, who was accompanied by an array of Shakertown supporters—Charlie Sturgill, Thomas Satterwhite (the treasurer of the Shakertown board), Bob Jewell, George Chinn, Willard Gabhart, Gene Royalty, Enos Swain, J. T. “Hop” Ingram, Jane Bird Hutton, and R. B. McClure, the lawyer who had endured some rough going with the Gwinns but had hung on to complete the deal; George Gwinn also witnessed the handover.
Taking full advantage of the enhancement of the project’s status conferred by the EDA loan, Wallace began writing and telephoning possible donors, seeking a contribution of $12,500 each toward the down payment. As the results showed, Shakertown was indeed beginning to take on the aura of a going concern; this procedure not only brought in the needed money but launched relationships with several persons who would play important continuing roles in the Pleasant Hill story. Checks came in from Barry Bingham, Jere Beam, J. Graham Brown, George Norton Jr., and Elbert Sutcliffe, of Louisville; Harry Blum, a Chicago friend of Beam’s; and Pansy (Mrs. Parker) Poe, a Mercer County landowner who lived in Thomasville, Georgia. With this success in hand, Wallace said, “I had the boldness to telephone Eli Lilly, whom I had never met, to ask him if Mr. Barry Bingham and I could come up to see him. After finding out that we were going to ask him for $12,500, he replied that there was no use for Barry and me to take such a long trip on a hot summer day. His check came the next day.” This characteristically thoughtful response from the Indianapolis pharmaceutical tycoon represented the first step in a friendship that would prove notably fruitful for Shakertown.
Then a friend in Versailles, Kentucky, suggested that Wallace phone Mrs. W. Alton Jones in Maryland. Though she was another person Wallace had never met, he had been acquainted with her husband, the chairman of Cities Service Oil Company, who had been killed just three years earlier in the crash of an American Airlines flight in New York. Jones had been on his way to join former President Eisenhower on a fishing trip and had won a strange kind of renown when it came to light that he was carrying in his pockets some $20,000 in cash. What, everybody wondered, was the money for? (The usual conclusion, naturally, was that it was for political purposes.) Though Wallace was prepared to go to Maryland to meet with Mrs. Jones, she very agreeably saved him the trip and promptly sent in her $12,500 check; Pleasant Hill now had another important new friend. With the needed money in hand, Wallace could make the down payment and the coveted farm belt encircling Pleasant Hill now belonged to the corporation. The balance of the debt after the down payment was to be covered by twenty-year installment notes at 6 percent interest; this meant semiannual payments of $33,337.
To avoid any complications with the EDA through their new ownership of producing and profit-making farms, the Shakertown trustees decided to create a separate corporation, the Shakertown Land Company, to hold the property. By taking this action, Shakertown sidestepped a major problem: it avoided having to amend the financial projections contained in the application that had been approved, which might have caused delays and, worse, might have brought about a change of mind by the EDA on the ground that Shakertown was incurring a large debt that was not an essential part of the historic restoration. It therefore was necessary to keep the Gwinn farms out of the mortgage.
The fact that the restoration of the village was now assured would act to increase the value of the land, and Wallace and his associates had another value enhancer to point to: the state highway department had agreed to move Highway 68, rerouting it around the village, a step that, besides its other benefits, would create a mile of new frontage for the farm. By June 1965, rights-of-way had been obtained; the state would award the contract the following September. Moving the narrow, curving highway would indeed alleviate a dangerous situation as more and more visitors came, flocking in and out of buildings and crossing the road, and it would also do away with a distracting twentieth-century presence in the middle of the nineteenth-century village. (Cogar would be familiar with this kind of move from his experience at Williamsburg, where Rockefeller had banished the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad from the town.) In addition, the move would create room for the construction of parking lots between the village and the highway. But beyond those points, Jim Cogar’s master plan—the plan approved by the EDA—showed the highway removed from the village and replaced by the old macadam road; therefore, it had to be done. Otherwise, the EDA could tell the Louisville bankers that Wallace and his associates had not lived up to the promises they had made.
Wallace recalled that Cogar used to say, “ ‘The only land I want is that which adjoins us,’ and to that of course there was no end. We would get one piece and he’d immediately want to get the next one. We were able to get what finally came to our 2,250 acres of land. The protective area is one of the most important things we have. We have miles of protection for the village on every side.” As Wallace once observed, “I had seen what happened to Old Sturbridge Village. It was honky-tonked to death.” Commercial encroachment became so oppressive at Old Sturbridge, Wallace learned, that the board entertained the idea of buying land on a neighboring highway and, so to speak, giving the village a new front door and shutting up the old entrance.
In their determination to acquire all the surrounding land, Wallace and his fellow trustees went after the original Shaker ferry property. Stretching some thirty-eight hundred feet along the Kentucky River palisades, with two original buildings the Believers had used in their river trade, this tract represented the only land between the village and the river that had not been part of the Gwinn deal. Negotiations conducted by Charlie Sturgill produced a deal for $35,000, with a down payment of $8,000. This time the first payment came from Wallace himself, who advanced the money (and thus found himself in the unusual position of holding Shakertown’s note).
Early in 1965 Shakertown, Inc., fulfilled a long-felt need by acquiring the only village building the corporation did not yet own, the Meeting House, which currently served as the home of the Shakertown Baptist Church. The trustees felt a special urgency in pursuing this property because of rumors that an oil company had its eye on it, a possibility that stirred up twentieth-century visions of glowing signs and gas pumps in the middle of the restored village. But the story had more to it than that. Possession of the Meeting House actually constituted the key to the restoration, because as long as the Baptists owned it the state highway could not be dug up, moved away, and replaced by an old stagecoach road.
In an unusual deal made in negotiations conducted largely by Houlihan and Cogar, the church drove a hard bargain. The deacons agreed to trade the building for 2½ acres of land down Highway 68 toward Harrodsburg, provided that Shakertown, Inc., would build a church and a parsonage on that land. Much later, in the continuing drive for property, the corporation would acquire other buildings, but this transaction gave it total possession of the village itself.
The new church and parsonage came with a price tag of $50,000; Nettie Jones gave the money as a personal gift, after Wallace and Cogar had paid her a visit at her home in Easton, Maryland. An outgoing woman, Mrs. Jones had not only become a friend of Pleasant Hill but, in a characteristic move by Wallace, had now been placed on the board of trustees. (“I am flattered that you see fit to ask me to help you,” she wrote.) And the $50,000 was not the only yield of the visit—the W. Alton Jones Foundation gave $100,000 toward purchases of land. Later in the year, Mrs. Jones shrewdly noted to Wallace: “I smile at the suggestion you make of completion of a project in Dec. ’66. Jim will never finish, if I know him.”
The prospect of still more money for buying land came in September 1965 from a promising new source. One day a group of officials from the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation of Pittsburgh flew in to Blue Grass Field in Lexington, having previously told Wallace in a phone call that they wanted to take a look at Pleasant Hill and talk about the plans for restoring the village. This development resulted from a conversation between a Shakertown trustee, Julia Hallowell, and her friend Cordelia Scaife May, a Mellon heiress. Having arranged a Kentucky-ham-and-biscuit picnic lunch for the visitors, Wallace eagerly showed them around Pleasant Hill, though he was a little perturbed that while “Jim Cogar had been able to clean up part of the village,” at this early stage of the restoration “several buildings looked dilapidated to visitors.”
When it came time to talk money, Wallace optimistically told one of the bankers in the party that half a million dollars would do very nicely in carrying the debt on the Gwinn farms. In response, the banker and a few others spoke of giving perhaps $10,000 apiece; with impressive chutzpah, Wallace rejected the offer as too small. The next day, back in Pittsburgh, the banker phoned with a promise of $100,000. When Wallace, still looking for the half-million, expressed his disappointment, the banker assured him that when recipients made prudent use of donations, the foundation usually gave further grants. This first contribution of $100,000, to be used for land purchases “to further protect the Village and to add several Shaker buildings to those already owned by the Pleasant Hill Corporation,” proved indeed to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship for Shakertown.
Shakertown, Inc., was now taking in considerable money, but it was spending a great deal, too. By August 1965, 26 trustees had contributed $442,000; 49 other donors had contributed $155,900; and 652 small contributors had given $42,700, for a total of $640,600. But the chairman issued a warning: “In order to preserve our objectives, we have had to assume substantial amounts of instalment financing which are so burdensome that we should refinance as much of it as early as possible, and should provide substantial funds, in addition, for numerous phases of the project for which the proceeds of our long-term loan are not available.” The federal loan would make a vital contribution, and it had brought credibility with it, but strong fund-raising efforts would continue to be needed.
The last week in October saw one great success. Invited by Wallace to visit Pleasant Hill, Mr. and Mrs. Eli Lilly came down from Indianapolis on October 25 in their Rolls-Royce with their chauffeur at the wheel, meeting Wallace in Louisville for lunch at the Pendennis Club. Afterward they transshipped to Wallace’s Oldsmobile sedan for the drive to Pleasant Hill, with their chauffeur dutifully following them in their own car. The Lillys proved to be likable and direct persons who avoided any ostentation and seemed genuinely appreciative of small favors; Eli Lilly expressed his thanks for “one of the most interesting days there ever has been.” Something of an antiquarian himself, Lilly wrote about early Indiana history and folklore, and he edited the 1860s diary of Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. As president of his company during the Depression, Lilly, unlike other employers, did not lay off workers but instead kept them busy painting walls, washing windows, and sweeping floors and sidewalks until the plant could resume normal production. He even expanded the company’s sales force.
Before retiring for the night at the Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg, Lilly told Wallace that he and his wife would speak to the officials of the Lilly Endowment about a $100,000 contribution to Shakertown (a sum equal to perhaps $500,000 a generation later). When the couple came down to breakfast the next morning, however, Lilly said things had changed, giving Wallace an anxious moment until his guests told him that they had decided, instead of bothering with the endowment and the fuss of a special board meeting, just to give personal checks themselves, half of the amount coming from each. This $100,000 represented the largest gift Shakertown had received. Chuckling about the transaction in a later conversation with his daughter, Wallace told her that the Lillys probably took the donation “out of the grocery money.”
Wallace’s earlier forecast of a substantially completed restoration by the end of 1965 had proved overoptimistic—Washington Reed and his associates could not produce all the finished drawings, which they created in the minute detail, until the middle of the year. At one point, in February, Wallace reported to the board that work on the plans and specifications was “proceeding very slowly and many questions and problems were developing.” Then all plans and engineering specifications were offered for public bidding; Sullivan and Cozart of Louisville was chosen as the general contractor, and in the end the project awarded twenty-one separate contracts, all the way from carpentry to plumbing and electricity. Bids for overnight facilities for visitors and for construction of site utilities, for instance, were taken only in April 1966, and on June 21 Wallace stabbed a narrow shovel into the lawn next to the Centre Family House to turn the first earth and begin the action.
In the meantime, tragedy had struck. Reed, whom everybody admired, suffered a massive heart attack during the winter, but at first he seemed to be recovering from it. On May 30, however, came the shocking news of his death. “He was going to move here and actually supervise the restoration,” Thomas said. “It was going to be the capstone of his career.” Chuck Graves, dean of the University of Kentucky College of Architecture and a Shakertown trustee, agreed to take Reed’s place as chief architect for the restoration. Fortunately, Reed had done his work so thoroughly that the project could be carried out just as he had visualized it. His assistant in his home office, Wallace Taylor, came from Warrenton to serve as resident project manager—filling the post as required by the EDA regulations.
By now, though only the Centre Family House with its little museum could be considered a standard tourist attraction, Pleasant Hill was drawing more than eighteen thousand visitors a year and showing signs of becoming a significant employer in Mercer County, with fifteen to twenty persons serving as guides or turning out the reproductions of Shaker furniture and a half-dozen more operating the farm. Weavers across the state were producing wool and burlap carpeting for the Paint Creek Weavers of Paintsville, who had the contract for supplying rugs for the guest rooms; curtains in authentic styles and colors would come from the Quicksand Craft Center, another mountain enterprise hooked into this Blue Grass restoration. Soon more guides and other workers of all kinds would be required to meet the anticipated crowds of day visitors and overnight guests; the latter were expected to number as many as a hundred.
But the shortage of money remained a chronic problem. In a brilliant bit of co-opting, Wallace had persuaded Henry Offutt to join the board, and in June 1966 the Louisville banker became chairman of the finance committee. This was just in time for the two of them to propose to the Gwinn brothers that Shakertown not pay its next installment on the land purchase, due on July 1, but simply hand over the interest portion on this and future installments for the next five years, while giving 6 percent notes for the principal due during this time. This move, Wallace noted succinctly, would “reduce the annual burden of making cash payments.”
At the same time, the board voted to authorize Wallace to buy still more land, this time some 120 acres down the hill on Shawnee Run (later called Shaker Creek), the site of the original settlement of the Shakers, which had contained the gristmill, sawmill, and linseed oil mill, and part of the orchards. This area was once crossed by a covered bridge and later by a bridge still called the Kissing Bridge. The money for this acquisition would come from the lady who had become one of Pleasant Hill’s best friends, Nettie Jones. “I can remember him calling her when he had to have money,” Betty Morris said. “He would say, ‘Now, Nettie, we need this or that,’ and she would come through.”
Only one more land acquisition remained—for the time being. Not much more than a quarter of a mile from Shakertown, on the road leading to Danville through Burgin, stood the Shakertown School on a tract of about three acres. As school consolidation came to Mercer County, the board of education announced that this building would be put up for sale at a public auction. Here was the kind of situation Jim Cogar feared: a piece of property like this could pass into the hands of somebody who would set up a commercial operation of some kind right in Pleasant Hill’s front yard and destroy or at least impair the carefully crafted illusion of a trip back in time.
Shortly before the auction, Wallace and his colleagues learned that an entrepreneur from Indiana intended to buy the school property and establish a trailer park with a fast-food stand to serve all the hundreds of fishermen who regularly passed by bound for Herrington Lake a few miles beyond. A local Mercer County contractor turned out to have similar plans, and as the sale opened the two competitors quickly ran the price up to $16,000, which was about what buyers had paid for other county schools. But, not stopping there, the bidding moved on, breaking $20,000. Despite that, Wallace said, “we felt that Shakertown must have the property for protection, so I began to bid, under Mr. Herbert Gwinn’s guidance, until it was awarded to Shakertown at $25,000.”
Now arose a familiar situation: Shakertown did not have the $25,000. “We paid 10 percent down,” Wallace said, “and took a chance on raising the balance due in thirty days.” To lessen the odds on this gamble, Wallace turned to Cordelia Scaife May of Pittsburgh, who had already given highly tangible proof of her interest in the conservation of the land surrounding Pleasant Hill. Mrs. May did not disappoint Wallace, promptly providing the needed balance; she even sent her “money manager” to Kentucky to counsel Wallace and his associates. Shakertown, Inc., now possessed more than half of the 4,369 acres owned by the Shakers at the height of their prosperity.
As the restoration progressed through 1966 and into 1967, friends of Shakertown could find considerable satisfaction in the knowledge that the project was reaping the benefits of having a hard-driving financier to keep it going and an aesthetic perfectionist to make it appealing to the press and the public. But the third side of the triangle remained open until one January day in 1967, when Earl Wallace and Betty Morris drove to Louisville for a meeting at the downtown Pendennis Club with a lady named Elizabeth Cromwell Kremer.
A native of Cynthiana, Kentucky, Mrs. Kremer (who was Mrs. Morris’s aunt and thus was one of Bob Jewell’s numerous cousins) could claim as much specialized standing in her field as Wallace could in his. After receiving her degree in home economics from the University of Kentucky, she had gone to New York, where she had become a food manager for the Schrafft’s restaurant chain and then for another chain called Ship Grill. Returning to the Ohio Valley, she had worked in the restaurant business in Cincinnati and then had opened the French Village restaurant, part of the Canary Cottage chain, in the Heyburn building in downtown Louisville, where she acquired a strong local following. Something of a pioneering woman as a restaurant executive, she then went back to Cincinnati to open and manage the Canary Cottage there, and also got married. Her husband, Harold Kremer, was a construction engineer who was frequently transferred, and Mrs. Kremer soon retired from business, devoting much of her time to rearing her two daughters; by 1967, in fact, she had been out of the restaurant business for twenty-six years.
But everybody, including her old school friend Jim Cogar, remembered her fame as a food expert. Though Pleasant Hill was not yet ready for dining rooms, Wallace, looking ahead, had talked with and been turned down by two companies that operated historic inns in New England and Virginia. One explained that the rural location of Pleasant Hill and the limited space in the Trustees’ House would work together to keep the operation from turning a profit. This judgment came as particularly disturbing news to Wallace because his projections for the EDA had presented the dining rooms and guest rooms as moneymakers. Inspired by favorable mention of Elizabeth Kremer on all sides and also, perhaps, by the regional fame of Cynthiana as an incubator of good cooks, Wallace in early 1966 sent out a feeler to her, but she, too, turned him down.
Now, as work proceeded on the buildings and the grounds at Pleasant Hill, people by the hundreds came to look at what was happening. Mrs. Kremer’s husband had died in November 1966, and the mission that sent Wallace and Betty Morris to Louisville was to try to recruit her to come to Shakertown and establish and operate a sandwich shop to serve the sightseers. She did not immediately accept this proposition—she was sixty-five now and had not worked in business since 1941. She was interested but doubtful; as Betty Morris said, “The whole restaurant business had changed so much. When she was running things, people were dying to work. And there was no frozen food, and all that.” But since the idea of filling her time with this new project had its appeal, too, Mrs. Kremer decided to ask her daughters “if they thought she could do it at such an old age.” They responded with enthusiasm, telling her that “it would be a marvelous new life” for her and that she had no reason to stay in Louisville. And Wallace as always had his own brand of persuasion.
Mrs. Kremer soon had a snack-and-sandwich operation up and running in the Old Stone Shop, which had served as the home and office of Dr. W. F. Pennebaker, the last Shaker physician and the man who had made the arrangement with George Bohon, the Harrodsburg businessman, whereby the Shakers deeded their land in exchange for Bohon’s agreement to care for them until their deaths. Pennebaker proved to be the next to last of the Shakers, being survived only by Mary Settles. This Shaker history played a part in luring Mrs. Kremer to Pleasant Hill, since she had known Sister Mary. “I really have a great respect and admiration for the Shakers,” Mrs. Kremer once said, “and enjoy trying to bring a little of what they had here—integrity and hospitality.”
Although a tiny, seemingly frail woman, just five feet tall, Mrs. Kremer proved to have an abundance of energy. Having held managerial positions during the Depression, as Betty Morris noted, she expected an employee to put in a good day’s work; “she was hard-driving but fair,” as Jim Thomas put it. Mrs. Kremer soon found herself helping to design and equip the kitchen and dining rooms in the Trustees’ House. She had promised to come for two months but agreed stay on at Pleasant Hill as director of food service, as Wallace had no doubt hoped and expected.
The triangle was now complete, and it had three perfectionist sides. By the end of 1967 the first stage of the restoration had been completed—the buildings were finished and they had been furnished in proper Shaker style. Although not all of the t’s were crossed and i’s dotted, the government inspectors had approved the work and all the contractors and suppliers had been paid. With Phase One finished, Wallace and the other trustees now looked to launching Phase Two, this time not under strict government controls but with money from private sources.
But first would come the opening of the restored Pleasant Hill to the general public. Having decided to wait until spring, the board planned a shakedown operation for early April, to try the dining room and test the beds; both food and lodging passed this examination. Afterward, one delighted member wrote Cogar, “This dream could never have come true without you at the helm, Jim—everyone knows this.” Then, on April 15, in a relatively low-key event, the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill officially opened its doors to all comers. Tourists could now go through six buildings, spend the night in any of fifty-two guest rooms, all furnished with reproduction—and some original—Shaker pieces, and eat in the dining rooms in the Trustees’ House.
Elizabeth Kremer could now move on from sandwiches to full-scale menus. “I can remember,” said her daughter Evalina Settles, “that she got everything she could read on the Shakers, as far as the food went, and that’s where they got the Shaker lemon pie that became so famous. They were able to pull in women who knew how to cook—farm wives and others who were good basic cooks and wanted jobs. I can’t tell you how many books she got her hands on that told you what types of food the Shakers had. She wanted to keep it simple, which is what the Shakers did.”
These simple meals, which would quickly win regional and even wider renown, would feature, along with cornerstones like roast beef, pork tenderloin, and chicken, such favorites as corncakes, stuffed peppers, tomato celery soup, and eggplant, and pies—chess as well as Shaker lemon—that would bring in customers all by themselves. According to one of her daughters, Mrs. Kremer had one standard bit of advice about cooking: “Always taste your food. If it suits you, then it will please your guests.” As Jim Thomas put it, “She established the standard for excellence here.” She would serve for twenty-one years and would produce two cookbooks, We Make You Kindly Welcome and Welcome Back to Pleasant Hill, which would enjoy perpetual popularity.
The facilities at Pleasant Hill would quickly win favorable comment on all sides, but no judgment seemed more sound than that of Nettie Jones, who came from Maryland for the trustees’ shakedown overnighter and, back home, wrote Cogar that she was “thrilled” over the visit. “I think things ran very smoothly for a ‘trial run,’ ” she said. “And all the guests were really home folks celebrating a fantastic accomplishment in an unbelievably short time.”
What Mrs. Jones did not know was that, at the time, the bank balance of Shakertown, Inc., amounted to no more than $500.