Regional Specialization in Communal Agriculture The Shakers, 1850-1880

When the Shakers established communal farms in the Ohio Valley, they encountered a new agricultural environment that was substantially different from the familiar soils, climates, and markets of New England and the Hudson Valley.The ways in which their response to these new conditions differed by region has not been well documented.While some writers found essential similarities among the various Shaker communities, we exploit an underused source of data to show that Eastern and Western Shakers farmed in ways that were more similar to their neighbors than to each other.Shaker activity in the West dated from early in the nineteenth century.Within ten years of the missionary expedition of 1805, the movement that had already established several communities in New England and New York had added 5 more settlements in Ohio and Kentucky and converted hundreds of new members into the faith.Altogether, the Shakers maintained 17 communities that lasted more than 75 years, spread through a crescent from western Kentucky to Maine. 1 Despite the regional diversity among Shaker settlements, it is interesting that some of the literature on the Shakers often treats these communes as being almost identical.The pioneering scholar of the Shakers, Edward Deming Andrews, fostered this view by asserting that "[e]ach of the Shaker villages was like the others, not only in the organization of its religious and temporal affairs, but in its architecture, in its customs and folk ways, in its dress and the speech of its inhabitants, and in the general nature of its architectural, horticultural and industrial art activities." 2 Andrews then focused on the largest Shaker community at New Lebanon, New York, as representative of all Shaker communities.Because of the dominating influence of Andrews on Shaker studies, the result was either an approach that considered all communities as being identical, or one that centered on the New Lebanon or Eastern commu-