Despite his advanced age, Earl Wallace had continued his uninterrupted close supervision of the Pleasant Hill operation until the weekend he died. Just a few days earlier—proving that he did not always insist on adding property to the Shakertown holdings—he had closed his last deal, which involved the sale of 1,431 acres of farmland (given in the 1970s by Pansy Poe) and added $1 million to the village endowment, doubling it. Without Wallace, said Wilson Wyatt, “Shakertown wouldn’t exist.” “He was Shakertown,” added Philip Davidson. “Everybody understood that.”
But, in fact, everybody did not understand it. The dissenters even included Shakertown’s president since 1975, Jim Thomas, who might well have agreed with the view that Wallace was Shakertown in earlier years but felt that during the latter 1980s the chairman had devoted excessive attention—and money—to the development of the Shakertown Roundtable, at the expense of day-to-day maintenance of the village and of needed updating of the infrastructure. Thomas even cited a somewhat less-than-glowing 1989 restaurant review in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Wallace was not “embarrassed” by problems with the physical plant and hence was disinclined to remedy them, according to Thomas; hence roofs, mechanical systems, and ventilating and other equipment of all kinds had deteriorated badly and even become obsolete in the 1980s. Made an ardent preservationist by his experience first in Louisville and then through the years of close association with Jim Cogar at Pleasant Hill, Thomas concluded that Wallace had simply lost interest in the Shaker Village as an outdoor museum. “He disdained the use of the word ‘museum,’” Thomas recalled, “and prohibited the staff from using the word.”
In moving the emphasis at the village to conferences, specifically the Roundtable, Thomas said, Wallace brushed aside the preservation and education advocates on the staff and grew testy with their pleas for support. He eliminated the funds for staffing the library, for acquiring primary and secondary source materials, and for periodicals, Thomas remembered. This unhappy time found Thomas and Ed Nickels, then the director of collections, using their own money to buy needed materials and memberships in professional organizations so that the library would receive their publications. Staff travel was eliminated from the budget, as the increasingly autocratic chairman ruled that staff members who attended professional meetings during the week, at their own expense, would lose vacation time.
The last annual report on the village itself, Thomas noted, was written by Wallace in 1979. During the 1980s, the chairman focused on producing glossy reports about the Roundtable, a practice that was discontinued after Wallace’s death when Thomas reactivated the annual reports to include preservation and educational programs and progress in village activities.
Although Wallace would not spend money on such items as Shaker furniture, Thomas finessed that obstacle in 1984 by winning a $250,000 grant from the James Graham Brown Foundation for furniture purposes. Also in the 1980s, despite Wallace’s cooling interest in scholarly conferences on preservation, Thomas convened and chaired meetings that brought to Pleasant Hill representatives from Old Sturbridge, Deerfield, and similar historic villages. Thomas left no doubt that in the conflict between those primarily interested in the historic legacy of the village itself and those who saw it just as much as a setting for a variety of educational and cultural activities, he gave preservation an emphatic Number One priority.
Outside the Pleasant Hill circle during the 1980s, preservationists had taken a highly favorable view of Wallace’s performance. In 1985, at the age of eighty-six, the chairman saw his efforts in behalf of Shakertown win recognition across the country as well as at home, as he received the medal for historic preservation from the Garden Clubs of America and the John Wesley Hunt award from the Blue Grass Trust. But behind the scenes at Pleasant Hill, the board of trustees had long harbored an anti-Wallace faction, or, at least, a group that only reluctantly acquiesced in the chairman’s direction of village affairs. Wallace had plenty of supporters, however, and his prestige remained enormous among people who could look back two decades and more to days when the fledgling Pleasant Hill project had been widely derided as “Wallace’s Folly.” Such factors, together with the chairman’s well-known dominating personality and assertive management style, meant that he continued, unchallenged, in charge of affairs, even into his nineties.
Regardless of the tensions and dislikes that had existed at the top, Wallace’s death confronted Shakertown’s trustees with a problem they had not faced since 1961, when Wallace had become temporary chairman of the incorporators of Shakertown at Pleasant Hill; his supposedly short-time tenure had lasted from those shaky, penniless days, when many had considered the restoration little more than an impossible dream, through twenty-nine years that had seen Shakertown achieve national recognition as a historic village. The choice of Wallace’s successor, however, came as no surprise to anybody. William T. Young of Lexington had joined the Shakertown board in 1985 (“as you get older you become available to work on some of these things”) and had later been persuaded by Wallace to serve as vice chairman, which, Young said, “was the same as putting the finger on me when he died.” Thus Wallace had regarded Young as his heir presumptive, and at the June board meeting the trustees confirmed the selection.
The new chairman, who was seventy-two, expressed some initial surprise at this turn of events. “I never really anticipated being chairman,” he said. “I really thought Earl Wallace would live forever”—a view, one feels, that to some extent was shared by Wallace himself. Like his predecessor, Young had no particular devotion to the Shakers but admired Pleasant Hill and the achievement of those who had preserved it, and he fully believed in its importance for the Blue Grass area and the entire state of Kentucky. If the Shakertown trustees wanted an astute businessman in the chairman’s seat, they could hardly have made a better choice. As many observers commented, Young, a trim gentleman with a dash of elegance, seemed to have a golden touch in every sphere of activity, from peanut butter to storage and hauling to soft drinks to thoroughbreds; for some time he held the largest single block of stock in the Humana corporation. No special touch at all, Young once declared: “You can take any business, and if you just do a little better job, you’ll succeed.” That approach produced remarkable results in the racing world, in which Young, who entered it at sixty, saw to it that he had the best people working for him and went on to breed thoroughbreds that won the Breeders’ Cup and all three legs of the Triple Crown.
Involved as he was in a variety of businesses and philanthropies, Young made it plain that he would not seek to duplicate Wallace’s absorption in the minutiae of Pleasant Hill. “Mr. Wallace devoted 100 percent of his time to it,” he said. “That would be hard for me to do.” Instead, after meetings involving the board and staff, the board approved Young’s plan to divide Wallace’s position in two, with Jim Thomas retaining his title as president and now, as chief executive officer, acquiring the operational responsibilities that normally go with the title. This arrangement pleased both men. Aside from the limits on his own time, Young preferred an administrative structure in which the board, while having its own responsibilities, was separate from the chief executive. The new CEO, who had essentially functioned as museum curator under Wallace’s chairmanship, now had the opportunity he had long desired to spread his administrative wings. “Mr. Wallace was a very hands-on person, very involved in Shakertown in every way. Mr. Young is more of a traditional chairman,” Thomas told a reporter. “I’m a good chairman,” Young summed up years later. “I don’t interfere with anybody.”
Now that he had a new chairman to work with, Thomas made the most of the opportunity to explain his views and concerns, and Young proved to be a receptive listener. “After a lot of conversation and due study of the operation,” as Thomas summed it up, “Bill Young decided that we needed to reaffirm the mission of the corporation. This mission is basically the preservation and interpretation of this remarkable national landmark site.” Young soon moved to appoint “an ad hoc committee to assess long-term facility needs at the village,” chaired by Edie Bingham and Sally Brown, which produced a comprehensive list of overall priorities for the village. Underlying the list was its call for a new mission statement and long-range plan “designed to place the highest institutional priority on education and interpretation.” Recommendations included strengthening the core interpretation programs and developing an interpretive plan, “articulating the primary themes and messages Shakertown wants to convey”; the village also needed to improve orientation for visitors. On the physical side, the buildings should be evaluated and documented, and, in fact, archaeologists should conduct a survey of the entire village site, thus making more knowledge available for practical use—with visitors always in mind. Reflecting Thomas’s worry about the Shakertown collections, the committee called for fresh emphasis on proper storage and documentation.
Young then chose Edie Bingham to lead a long-range planning committee that would, in effect, assign priorities to the priorities and show how they could be turned into realities. One means of accomplishing that goal, of course, would be money. Young adopted a policy of reinvesting all the income from Shakertown’s $2 million endowment, using none of it for current operations. The chairman also pushed the endowment committee to invest in stocks, and indeed he had the times with him: during the 1990s the endowment would grow to more than $10 million.
In 1991, conveniently marking the thirtieth anniversary of the incorporation of Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, the Young administration launched a capital campaign, the first such effort since Wallace’s differently focused drive in the 1970s to raise money to cover the interest on the government loan. Now the drive came in response to the problems with the village infrastructure that for several years had perturbed Thomas. Whatever the differences in outlook at Pleasant Hill had been, the restoration was now a generation old and clearly needed renewing.
“We found Shakertown almost in crisis,” said Bob Warren, vice president of Bill Young’s company (when you acquired Young’s services in an endeavor of any kind, you also acquired “Young, Inc.”). Warren, a former Kentucky state finance director, continued, “There were two urgent needs—renovation and capital—and this was in the face of declining tourism.” Beyond taking basic steps in these areas, since “visitation was going down and we had to do something,” the administration undertook a thorough study of the dining operations, with the result that ways were found to save some $200,000 a year. For one thing, the long-established no-tipping policy was abolished, which meant that patrons would in effect pay an increased share of staff wages—an important consideration, since the figures showed that labor costs amounted to two-thirds of revenue. In another change of policy, the village began accepting credit cards, a move Wallace had been reluctant to make, chiefly because he objected to paying the required fees to the issuers of the cards. Though his attitude seemed anachronistic in 1990, he had not been wholly idiosyncratic in holding it; Colonial Williamsburg, the national paradigm of historic restoration, had resisted the cards just as long and had made the switch at just about the same time as Shakertown. The village also adopted a long-deferred handicapped-accessibility project, a development Wallace had opposed—on puristic grounds, some friends believed, though Thomas said that Wallace simply “didn’t want to spend the money”; here the tide of history clearly and irresistibly ran in the other direction. And in the new restoration careful planning cleverly concealed the lifts for handicap access, as was the case with the other modern features. Bob Warren went on to develop “a deep understanding of the fiscal aspect of the Shaker Village,” Thomas said, and as liaison with Young he proved to be “a superb colleague, helpful in every area.”
By 1993, Young had proved himself to be a formidable fund-raiser on behalf of Shakertown—the capital campaign ended with a total of $5,528,818, exceeding the $5 million goal. The chairman proved particularly persuasive in dealing with wealthy members of the board, several of whom made contributions in the $250,000 range. Beyond paying for the needed physical changes, some of the money would go to the development of new interpretive programs; following the recommendations of a committee on interpretive work, the Shakertown board created two new positions, education specialist and historic farm specialist. The holders of these posts developed the Shaker Life exhibit, showing the role of the Believers’ religious convictions and the functioning of their families, and the historic farm program, which explored and presented the Shakers’ remarkable agricultural expertise, featuring live animals with, as one observer said, “sights, sounds, and smells.”
The realm of interpretation made a major advance through the work of Kim McBride of the University of Kentucky, whose archaeological survey, begun in the summer of 1990, located the foundations of many original buildings, of which thirty-four survive. The dramatic find here came in 1997, when McBride and her colleague, Philippe Chavance, a French architect, found the long-sought Shaker outdoor secret worship center called Holy Sinai’s Plain, a half-acre site about half a mile from the center of the village, which had proved elusive because the Shakers, after the 1840s, had disguised it as ordinary farmland. “The location of this holy field,” declared the elated McBride, “is something that has eluded researchers for more than thirty years.”
McBride’s dig did not represent the first archaeological efforts at Pleasant Hill. During the 1970s, some fifteen years earlier, a grant from the Lilly Endowment had funded a search, carried out over three summers, by a Centre College professor, Don Janzen, with the help of students, for the sites of the grist and other mills a mile down the hill from the village on the creek called Shawnee Run. Janzen, an enthusiastic practitioner of his professional discipline who continued to lead occasional archaeological tours of the village through the 1990s, had his own lively specialist views on historic preservation. He saw the restored beautiful and serene Pleasant Hill of the 1840s as entirely too much of a pristine package; for him, crumbled walls and fragments of pillars and posts in the village ought to have been left in their just-excavated state to serve as archaeological testaments to the passage of time. This view seems kin to that of a current writer on restoration, Howard Mansfield, for whom “good restoration should contain its opposite: going away, softening, decay.” (The curators at Colonial Williamsburg apparently had similar feelings when they decided to restore horse manure to the village streets.)
The drive for land and buildings had continued during the later years of Earl Wallace’s chairmanship, with the 1986 purchase of a neighboring 480-acre farm having brought back into the fold the last remaining group of original buildings, about a mile from the center of the village, known as the West Lot. Restored and opened for use in 1988, the West Lot dwelling became the new center for large conferences such as Roundtable meetings, and in 1990 a grant from the James Graham Brown Foundation, Kentucky’s largest foundation, provided $500,000 to finish the restoration of that particular building complex, including the West Lot Wash House, which was completed in 1992. (This very generous foundation took its name from a colorful Louisville multimillionaire who lived in a simple suite in his own hotel, suitably named the Brown, and was known as the richest man in Kentucky at the time of his death in 1969.)
Young was convinced by Thomas that they should continue the land drive, beginning in 1991 with the purchase of a two-acre tract, with two side-by-side houses fronting on Highway 33, half a mile from the village. Like various earlier acquisitions, this represented a defensive move against the possibility of those houses turning into dreaded gas stations, the fear that had haunted the founders in the 1960s. In 1997, the administration purchased a 101-acre tract colorfully known as the back Teater farm (to distinguish it from its neighbor, the front Teater farm), bordering the northwest corner of the West Lot and providing access to the Chinn-Poe Nature Preserve, located on the mouth of Shawnee Run at its junction with the Kentucky River. The chief virtue of this acquisition lay in the opportunity it gave Shakertown to increase the diversions it could offer visitors by developing hiking and horseback-riding trails; two years later twelve miles of trails were opened to the public, and eventually the total rose to forty.
From a preservationist point of view, two building projects earned much comment, in good part because of their deceptive nature. The new administration building, opened in 1994, stands next to the Trustees’ House parking lot and thus just on the edge of the restored area; the illusion comes from the fact that the building looks exactly like a black tobacco barn and, as such, attracts so little attention that it almost seems not to be there. During the next year came the “Building within a Building,” the new concrete-block research library and collections repository built inside an actual tobacco barn, also painted black. “The barn has been part of the village landscape for fifty or sixty years,” Thomas said at the time, “and we wanted to keep it that way.” The idea for the latter project, Thomas said, came from Young himself.
In 1999, the Shakertown administration honored the memory of Dot Clay, who had died during the year, by establishing the Dorothy Norton Clay Furniture Collection. In one move, Thomas was able to make up the earlier arrears in the assembling of original Shaker furniture and accessories from Pleasant Hill by the acquisition of an outstanding collection, numbering sixty-three pieces, from Mrs. Hazel Hamilton of nearby Buena Vista, in Garrard County, Kentucky; $149,000 toward the purchase came from board members and family and friends of Mrs. Clay, who had not only worked hard for Shakertown for many years but, as Earl Wallace once noted, had been the largest Kentucky contributor to the project. The Brown Foundation, which had become a good friend indeed of Pleasant Hill, granted an additional $50,000 for the cause.
Dominant among the concerns of the administration and the board at the beginning of the third millennium was the future of Pleasant Hill itself, caught up in what Thomas called “the struggle preservationists face to keep up public interest, awareness, and support at a time when historic sites are experiencing attendance declines. There is a problem, and the efforts of staff and trustees to cope with it are ongoing.”
In May 2000, saying that he wanted to unclutter his life, William T. Young announced his resignation as chairman of Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Inc., and retired, leaving the village “physically and financially in pristine condition”; after a life marked by extraordinary success in many fields of activity, Young would die four years later at the age of eighty-four. Alex Campbell, a Lexington businessman and close friend whom Young had picked as vice chairman of the Shakertown trustees and thus as his heir presumptive, took over as chairman. In his youth Campbell had been close to Earl Wallace, who, Young said, “was almost like a daddy to him,” giving the succession almost a dynastic quality. With reference to Campbell’s new responsibilities at Pleasant Hill, “I just told Alex not to let it deteriorate,” Young said. “It’s a Kentucky gem, and it should be preserved forever.”