single frame: Early evening at Shaker Village

Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill

Early evening at Shaker Village
Pentax K10D, 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 SMC Pentax-DA AL
2019

Margaret and I get away four times a year for a long weekend, usually in March, June, September, and December. Margaret started a new job recently and its demands will sadly keep us from our usual December visit to Chicago. To compensate we made two trips this summer, one to her hometown of St. Charles, Illinois, a few weeks ago, and one to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky over Labor Day weekend.

I’ll share more from Shaker Hill in posts to come, but in short the Shaker religious sect arrived here in 1805 and built quite a village of stone, brick, and wood frame buildings. They were innovative, building a system of running water throughout the village; the yellow buildings on the right were part of that system. They also lived communally; the stone building was one of three major houses the people lived in.

Today it’s a tourist destination with lodging on site. We stayed in a room in what had once been the East Family Wash House. The houses were named for their relative geographic location in the village, the people who lived in each house were called a family, and each family had a building in which they did their laundry. Innovatively, their laundry facility was horse powered, reducing the human manual labor of washing all those clothes and linens!

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Comments

6 responses to “single frame: Early evening at Shaker Village”

  1. J P Avatar

    Did Shakers do Adirondack chairs before they were done in the Adirondacks? I hope you take us into the running water system soon because that sounds cool!

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      The chairs are suspect, but they are at least hand made. As for the plumbing situation, unfortunately I don’t have anything to share other than that it exists and was unusual in its time.

  2. -N- Avatar
    -N-

    I really enjoy all this history and information about Midwest, having come originally from Illinois. I miss the lushness of the land, too, and remember the roads as well. We had dirt and gravel roads where I lived as a kid, so I particularly enjoy seeing the old, paved roads because they seemed so luxurious to me!

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      The old dirt and gravel roads are more and more rare now. Even the remotest roads we drove in KY were hard surfaced.

  3. Nancy Stewart Avatar
    Nancy Stewart

    Looking forward to more posts about this visit.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I have a few more queued up!

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