BY RANDY McNUTT
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[furniture]](/editions/1998/11/25/shaker_160x128.jpg)
The Warren County Historical Society Museum contains this Shaker kitchen.
(Craig Ruttle photo)
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LEBANON - On rolling countryside 4 miles west of this Warren County seat, the Shakers once lived celibately and productively.
Their 4,000-acre community, Union Village, stood on the present site of Otterbein Home from 1805-1913. At its peak in the mid-1800s, 700 people lived in the village.
Now the Shakers are gone. But Lebanon remains the home of the Midwest's finest Shaker collections - the Warren County Historical Society Museum.
"Shakers built a lucrative industry selling brushes and brooms," said director Mary Payne. "They were hard workers known primarily for their fine furniture."
Dozens of Shaker pieces occupy the museum's Robert and Virginia Jones Gallery, in the old brick Harmon Hall at 105 S. Broadway. The couple, who once operated the Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon, bought much of the furniture many years ago when it wasn't popular.
Parts of their original collection remain at the Golden Lamb. Recently, HGTV, the home-decorating cable channel, devoted a program to the Golden Lamb's Shaker collection.
Over the years, Shaker furniture's efficient simplicity has attracted a devoted following. The style is also widely reproduced. At the museum, visitors can see Shaker life through room-size displays of artifacts - the laundry room, dining room, trustees' room, kitchen and textile room.
Artifacts, many on loan from Otterbein, include Shaker dresses, a yarn winder, rocking chairs, a walnut trestle table with benches for eight, cherry corner cupboard, spinning wheel and a broom press. A Shaker brother in the East invented the flat broom, said Dennis Dalton, a Warren County historian who has studied the Shakers.
"They were an inventive people," he said. "They sold seeds and herbs nationally and invented the clothespin. They didn't obtain patents because they wanted to share knowledge."
The world didn't always thank them. Persecution forced Ann Lee (Mother Wisdom) and her few followers - the United Society of Believers in the Christ's Second Appearing - to leave England in 1774. By 1776, the group established itself in New York state. Members moved into Kentucky and Ohio in the 1800s.
Ms. Lee, who died a few years later, considered herself a messenger from God - a female Second Coming. She taught celibacy, and that God was Father and Mother. She wanted simplicity in everything. The sect's name came from its members' animation while in prayer. (At first, they were called Shaking Quakers.) Outsiders called them simply the Shakers.
Their then-radical theology - not to mention communal living - caused misunderstanding and animosity, even in Lebanon. Rumors circulated that Shakers kept women and children without their consent. In 1810, an armed mob of 500 men moved against Union Village.
"Many men living in the vicinity of Union Village believed that the leaders of the new sect were designing impostors, living in secret sins of the darkest dye, and (neighbors) were ready to wage a war of extermination against them, or drive them from the county," the editor of History of Warren County wrote in the 1880s.
Common Pleas Judge Francis Dunlevy persuaded the mob to disband.
In time, relations between locals and Shakers became cordial, but the sect's views and rules caused bitterness for years.
"Becoming a Shaker was a big commitment," Ms. Payne said. "Converts might leave their children with somebody on the outside or take them along. This became an issue because quite a few people from around here converted."
If a man decided to join the Shakers, there wasn't much his wife could do if he wanted to take the children.
"There were angry confrontations out there over the issue," Ms. Payne said. "When somebody joined the Shakers, he gave all his or her worldly goods to the group. That angered many relatives. Some people on the outside thought it was an off-the-wall sect."
These days, anger has faded to appreciation for the Shakers' fine lines and simple designs. Visitors stop at the museum and the Golden Lamb to see pieces of a people whose only real legacy is wood.
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