1830 BRICK DWELLING
Courtesy of Hancock Shaker Village
34 Lebanon Mountain Road
Hancock, MA 01237
Phone: 800-817-1137
www.hancockshakervillage.org
’Tis the gift to be simple
’Tis the gift to be free
’Tis the gift to come down
Where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves
In the place just right,
’Twill be in the valley
Of love and delight.
— ELDER JOSEPH, “SIMPLE GIFTS”
The Shakers began in Manchester, England in 1747 and came to America in 1774. Their tenets were communal living, gender equality, celibacy, and pacifism. The name Shaker reflects their exuberance during worship services. The Shaker village in Hancock dates to 1783 and was the third of nineteen Shaker communities started in the States. Other villages were in New York, Maine, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. By the mid-nineteenth century there were about five thousand Shakers, three hundred of whom lived on the three-thousand-acre Hancock farm. Their numbers dwindled in the twentieth century, and the Hancock community closed in 1960. The property was sold for use as a museum.
The 1830 Brick Dwelling is a large red-brick building which had sleeping accommodations for about one hundred people. The brothers and sisters lived in separate areas. A visit to the 1830 Brick Dwelling includes bedrooms, the dining room, the meeting room, and the kitchen, all of which display Shaker furniture (chairs, tables, candle stands and other pieces) and Shaker objects. The village has twenty buildings in which there are twenty-two thousand Shaker artifacts.