Building a Sustainable Future

Shaker Village

William Updike, VP of Natural and Cultural Resources
Mike Brown, Maintenance Foreman
Ben Leffew, Preserve Manager
Laura Baird, Assistant Preserve Manager
Mike Moore, Farm Manager

Sustainability of natural resources is a big concept that involves, to a large degree, the implementation of environmentally-friendly practices. Shaker Village’s property is expansive, and our activities are so diverse that we are able to model sustainable practices in many ways. For buildings to be more sustainable they need to be made as efficient as possible to lower energy use. For agriculture, it’s about taking care of the soil and decreasing the use of fertilizers. Setting aside 1000 acres of prairie and 800 acres of forest as natural space and wildlife habitat all contribute to this effort.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the sustainable practices currently taking place at Shaker Village. You may find some items that you are currently doing with your own home or property – and maybe a few that you should be doing!

Building Maintenance

  • Replacing incandescent, florescent, and halogen bulbs with LED light bulbs village-wide for energy savings
  • Gradually taking older, less efficient boiler/chiller HVAC systems off-line and replacing with geothermal systems
  • Operating certain buildings with set schedules for heating, cooling and lighting for energy efficiency
  • Managing paper, cardboard, glass and plastic recycling site-wide

Land Management

  • Using rechargeable mowers, trimmers, and leaf-blowers where possible, rather than gasoline powered
  • Mulching grass clippings
  • Collecting  leaves in the fall for use in the garden beds as mulch
  • Managing tree health village-wide
  • Repairing areas where erosion takes place, and putting in preventative measures to manage erosion and water drainage responsibly
New pathways and landscaping efforts are making areas of the Village grounds more accessible, while guarding from erosion.

Gardens

  • 150 Permanent garden beds
  • Low to no-till practices in gardens
  • Strict crop rotations
  • High diversity of crops
  • Integration of livestock into crop rotations to contribute nutrients and minerals back into the soil
  • Cover cropping to prevent erosion
  • Certified USDA Organic
  • Companion cropping, to support healthy growth without chemicals
  • Creation of own-fertility through composting farm/garden and restaurant waste
  • Poultry management of compost site – “deep litter method”
Non-chemical methods for weed control, including the use of “solar tarps,” have contributed to Shaker Village’s USDA Certified Organic status.

Orchard

  • Integration of runner ducks into orchard yard to clean the grounds and prevent pests
  • Proper fruit tree pruning to manage health
  • Natural spray management to no-spray management for apples
  • Fruit variety & root-stock selection for resiliency
Indian Runner Ducks enjoying their home in the Village’s Orchard.

Livestock

  • Preservation of heritage breeds
  • Strict livestock rotation to maintain integrity of pastures
  • Multi-species grazing to diversify impact on fields
  • Long rest period between grazing fields for recovery
  • Management through soil testing
  • Integration of livestock in Preserve/native grasses for natural management of those spaces
  • Shaker Village’s rule for grazing: Graze 1/3, Stomp 1/3 and leave 1/3 of grasses behind for recovery
Diversified livestock grazing in pastures at Shaker Village.

Preserve

  • Carbon sequestration (trapping more carbon) in the roots of native grasses and plants that cover 1,000 acres of our property
  • Increasing woody acreage = increase carbon sequestration
  • Invasive species management and promoting native plants enhances the property’s resilience in a changing climate
  • Limited use of herbicides
  • Partnering for stream water quality sampling with Kentucky River Watershed Watch
Native grasses and wildflowers have much larger root systems then cool-weather grasses allowing them to “trap” more carbon.

We hope to see you on a future tour of the Village’s Historic Centre, Farm and Preserve, where you can see and enjoy our sustainable practices in action!

If you are interested in making a donation to support our efforts, please click here.

“…one might suppose it would stand for a thousand years…”

Shaker Village

Jacob Glover, PhD, Program Manager

“The House is built of so dureable materials, that one might suppose it would stand for a thousand years, unless it was shaken down by an Earth quake, or something of the kind…” – Pleasant Hill Ministry to New Lebanon Ministry, August 16, 1830. IV: A054, Western Reserve Historical Society.

A view of the 1824-1834 Centre Family Dwelling’s east facade.

The 1824-1834 Centre Family Dwelling (CFD) is the most imposing, impressive structure the Shakers constructed at Pleasant Hill. At over 21,000 square feet, the CFD was one of the largest limestone buildings in the Commonwealth when it was completed in 1834, as well as one of the most architecturally significant. From its elegant balustrade and dormer to its breathtaking second floor meeting room, the CFD undoubtedly represents the pinnacle of the Shaker’s architectural achievements at Pleasant Hill.

And yet, despite the grandiose design and awe-inspiring nature of the structure, there are many elements and characteristics of the building that go unnoticed to most visitors to Shaker Village.

On a quick walk through the CFD, for instance, you might miss the subtle embellishments on the dining room columns that represent a departure from traditional Shaker design that avoided these decorative features because they were not necessary to structural integrity.


With nearly 80 residents in some years, there was a need for efficient storage space in the CFD. This large, built-in unit on the third floor provided an efficient way to store out-of-season clothing.

Or what about the built-in cabinets and drawers in the brothers’ and the sisters’ bedrooms that provided needed additional space for communal living? Did you notice which types of storage units the brothers and sisters preferred? The peg rails are seemingly everywhere, but did you see the lower peg rails in the sisters’ closets? What were those used for? Speaking of closets, why are there windows built into interior walls?

Other distinctive features abound. A dumb-waiter system that carried food from the cellar kitchen to the dining room made the job of preparing communal meals much easier. What about clean-up? The construction of the 1833 Water House directly beside the CFD played an integral role in helping the sisters clean-up after meals by providing clean spring water directly to the kitchen area. The list, as they say, could go on and on.

  • Looking north, over a balustrade to the bell tower.
  • Elegant lines and emphasis on natural light are hallmarks of the CFD’s design.

Beyond these original features of the CFD, there are even more caveats and hidden features due to the historic restoration and preservation of the structure that have taken place at Shaker Village since the 1960s. Beginning in 2017, work began on the building to install climate control and electrical lighting systems that have been integrated into the historic edifice in ways that are reversible and organic to the buildings 1850s appearance. The results? Ah, come on, we can’t reveal everything here…

Intrigued? Come to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill and explore this beautiful structure on your own, or take a guided tour to discover our favorite nooks and crannies! The Centre Family Dwelling is open from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm daily (and until 8:00 pm on Friday and Saturday), and the daily tour, Top to Bottom: The Centre Family Dwelling, runs throughout the fall and winter.

Check our website for a tour schedule and times. We’ll see you soon!

“‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free…”

Billy Rankin

Jacob Glover, PhD., Program Manager

By all accounts, most readers of this blog, and probably anyone who has heard any examples of Shaker Music, will recognize the lyrics quoted above. Many of you all probably even hummed the tune along as you read these memorable words. Written in 1848, Simple Gifts is undoubtedly the most recognized song attributed to the Shakers.

Popularized by Aaron Copland’s 1944 composition Appalachian Spring, the melody entered the canon of American popular culture. Subsequently, English songwriter Sydney Carter used the same melody with his own, original lyrics to write the hymn “Lord of the Dance” in 1963—a tune that American congregations have sung in worship ever since! From there it gets complicated, but to put it simply, popular musicians, car companies, the American Olympic Committee and many other groups have utilized the melody in one version or another for their own purposes.

Due in large part to its popularity, Simple Gifts has come to be synonymous with Shaker music as a whole. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.

As a group, the Shakers have written over 20,000 songs since their founding in 18th century England. At Pleasant Hill, songwriters and singers proliferated and produced a stunning collection of American music that still resonates to this day. Many of these songs, in fact, were notated in beautiful hymnals that we currently have in our archival collections!

Instead of traditional music notation, the Shakers used ‘letteral’ notation, so that all members of their communities could participate and sing along. –“A Hymn Book, Containing a Collection of Ancient Hymns…Compil’d and Recorded by Paulina Bryant,” Item 361, Library of Congress Shaker Collection

It’s not just the sheer volume of Shaker music that’s impressive. The Shakers also wrote many different types of songs (hymns, anthems, marches, celebratory songs, and more) over the years, and different eras of Shaker history often led to remarkably different creations. Within the Shaker societies, active participation in worship through both singing and dancing was vital to community life. More than just a social and creative outlet for the Shakers, music also served devotional and instructional purposes while providing structure to the very rhythms of their daily life.

Shaker music can also shed fascinating insight into the lives of individual songwriters. The Pleasant Hill community, in fact, was widely regarded by other Shaker settlements as possessing quite a number of members with exceptional musical talent.

Patsy Williamson was one such individual. Born an enslaved person in North Carolina, Patsy was brought to Pleasant Hill in 1812 by her enslaver and family. Within a year, the Shaker community had purchased her legal freedom and Patsy quickly became an integral member of the growing sect. Patsy would spend the rest of her life as a good and faithful Shaker—and prolific songwriter—in Mercer County.

One of Patsy’s most exceptional creations, Pretty Mother’s Home, speaks to some of the core tenets of Shaker theology and her belief that one day she would have a “pretty home” in Heaven. These ideas—and the fact that they were shared through music—would have been eminently familiar and relatable to Shakers living in disparate communities across America at this time.

The 1820 Meeting House at Pleasant Hill was built to allow the Shakers to worship in their unique style. During services, the Shakers used no musical instruments. They regarded human voices as the ideal instruments for worship.

To hear Patsy’s song (and many others!) that together comprise a buried treasure of American music, come out to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill and take part in our daily Shaker Music program that runs in the 1820 Meeting House at 11:00 am and 2:00 pm daily throughout the year.

I promise, there’s more to Shaker music than simple gifts, no matter how free they may be!

Water House Preservation…Part 2!

Billy Rankin

William Updike, Vice President of Natural and Cultural Resources

Many of you may recall we began working to preserve the 1833 Water House, just east of the 1824 Centre Family Dwelling, last summer with a major structural repair to the front of the building. Read more on that here! I am excited to tell you that within the next two weeks we will begin to start work on the second phase of this project to preserve one of the most important buildings at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill!

The south facade of the 1833 Water House was repaired in the summer of 2018.

The Water House contained the water tank the Pleasant Hill Shaker’s used to provide water to the village. Water was pumped uphill, from a spring, to the storage tank where it was distributed throughout the village in a piping system similar to how many of us get water to our homes today! This was one of the first waterworks west of the Allegheny Mountains, and one of the earliest in the nation.

Our work will involve making repairs to, and replacing as necessary, the roof rafters to remove the noticeable sag in the roof. Once that is complete we will make any other necessary structural repairs, and replace approximately ¾ of the siding. Much like a roof, siding is a sacrificial surface, and eventually reaches the end of it serviceable life.

We have already built new window frames and sashes for the upper gable windows, and have those ready to install. We also built a new front door. Most of the windows and the door of this structure were built during prior restorations, and our new versions are made of more resilient wood to provide many years of service in years to come. Once we complete all of the carpentry, we will install a new roof and paint the building! We look forward to reopening the building for guests to enjoy later this fall!

This project was made possible by generous donations from individuals who love Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, and help us care for this important site. If you would like to join us in this effort, please click here to donate!

Kentucky’s “Storybook Wedding” Destination

Billy Rankin

Rebecca Wilson, Catering & Event Sales Manager

When you book a wedding with Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, your experience is tailor-made for you. From a marshmallow roast in front of a cozy fire in the evening with a hayride, to bourbon tastings, picnics, private tours and more, Shaker Village offers an array of enjoyable activities for each loving couple.

Shaker Village has a broad variety of event spaces on its 3,000 acre property, although many couples have taken advantage of the retreat-like locations of the West Lot Dwelling and Meadow View Barn.

“When I think of our wedding, I think of it as an accumulation of events from the time we arrived on Friday until we all said goodbye Sunday morning. Having the West Lot be our home for the weekend allowed for so many amazing memories with our loved ones. The ceremony in the courtyard to the back of the house was an incredible experience! The intimate space allowed for unique participation from our guests, where I was able to incorporate Shaker-style bench seating and viewing areas on the two-story porches.”

When Megan and Casey visited Shaker Village for the first time at Craft Fair a few years ago, she fell deeply in love with its beauty and charm. When they began planning their wedding, she knew she wanted to incorporate their love of the outdoors and historical buildings. It was also important to them that they made their wedding weekend a celebration and experience for all their loved ones to cherish. The West Lot Dwelling at Shaker Village provided a gathering place for them, and the village accommodated all of their guest’s needs during the memorable weekend celebration. Family and friends were able to stay on the grounds, experience all the fun activities Shaker Village has to offer, and enjoy spending time with one another.

Food has always been a uniting force for Megan’s family, and the family-style meal they would share together was one of the most important details of their wedding. The southern farm-to-table dishes created by the chef is elevated in the most delightful and rustic way. Knowing that the ingredients that the chef would serve would be right out of the Shaker Village garden, Megan requested that the chef create a signature vegetable dish of her choice from what was available to her that day. Although the chicken dish and red wine braised short ribs were outstanding, the guests could not stop raving about the vegetables!

“Everyone is knowledgeable, professional and kind. I could not have hoped for a more special and unique venue than Shaker Village! Like Casey and I, our guests fell in love with its beautiful surroundings and interesting history. They enjoyed the hotel accommodations and all the activities Shaker Village has to offer during their stay. Shaker Village allowed us to create a magical experience for every person involved, and the memories of our weekend will be cherished by all.”

If you are interested in finding out more about creating your special day at Shaker Village, please contact our Event Sales department at 859-734-1558 or email: [email protected]!

Credits:

Photography: Desiree Fromm
Make-up: Britt Moses
Hair: Heather Cole Thomas-Blake Hair Studio
Bouquets: Flowers by Marnie and Jenny
Cake: Martine’s Pastries
Coordinator: Rita Matney
Rentals: Bryant’s Rent-All, Purdon’s, and VenYou Event Rentals