We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from the Shakers to the Separatists of Zoar

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Editors: Jennifer Lippert, Fannie Bushin

Designer: Paul Wagner

Special thanks to: Meredith Baber, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek Brower, Janet Behning,

Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Andrea Chlad, Benjamin English, Russell Fernandez, Will Foster,

Jan Hartman, Jan Haux, Diane Levinson, Katharine Myers, Margaret Rogalski,

Dan Simon, Andrew Stepanian, Elana Schlenker, Sara Stemen, and Joseph Weston of

Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cape, Francis, 1952– artist.

[Furniture. Selections.]

We sit together : utopian benches from the Shakers to the Separatists of Zoar /

Francis Cape. — First [edition].

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-61689-159-6 (pbk.)

1. Cape, Francis, 1952—Themes, motives. 2. Benches—United States.

3. Christian sects—United States. 4. Collective settlements—United States. I. Title.

NK2542.C37A4 2013

749’.3—dc23 2012048884

Communities & BenChes—

EphraTa CloiSTEr20

ThE ShakErS 28

SnoW hill nunnEry36

harmony SoCiETy40

SoCiETy of SEparaTiSTS of Zoar46

onEida pErfECTioniSTS52

CommuniTy of TruE inSpiraTion in amana56

huTTEriTES66

roSE VallEy72

BrudErhof (WoodCrEST CommuniTy)78

TWin oakS82

Camphill VillagE kimBErTon hillS88

—

Acknowledgments7

Foreword 8

Introduction 13

Bibliography94

Installation97

Image Credits112

Communities– & –

BenChes

20

The fourth earliest communal society in recorded American history, and the earli-est in this book, Ephrata Cloister is also the earliest American communal society for which we have extant material cul-ture. Several buildings along with some of their furniture and furnishings are preserved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The broth-ers and sisters of Ephrata Cloister were mystics who practiced an ascetic commu-nism. They slept on wood benches with wood blocks for pillows, and rose at mid-night every night to watch for the Second Coming. Renowned for their hymns, they sang each night in the Saal, their meeting house. While daily meals were spare and eaten at simple trestle tables in the dor-mitory houses, special days were marked with the celebration of Love Feasts, when

they gathered to sit and sing together on long benches in the Feast Hall.

Their leader, Johann Conrad Beissel, was a Pietist whose beliefs had brought him into conflict with the Lutheran authorities in his German homeland. He escaped to the religious freedom prom-ised by William Penn in Pennsylvania; but his radical views on Saturday worship and celibacy again caused a rift with the congregation he joined there. He decided on a hermit’s life and withdrew to the banks of the Cocalico Creek in northern Lancaster County. However, it was not long before he was joined by like-minded men and women attracted to his charisma and preaching. What had begun as a hermitage soon grew into a thriving com-munity. Beissel established two Orders of Solitaries, composed of brothers and

EphraTa CloiSTEr17 3 2 – 17 9 6

Sleeping Bench, SaronRefectory BenchFeast Hall Bench

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e p h r ata c l o i s t e r

sisters, and a third order of Householders, composed of families who settled farms around the cloister and contributed tithes in return for spiritual guidance.

The brothers and sisters were celi-bates; they lived in separate buildings, and had (in principle) little interaction. The sisters’ house, Saron, a three-story wooden building, still stands today. On the second and third floors are individual cells, or kammern; in each is an L-shaped wood bench, about fourteen inches wide, where the sister slept, possibly curled round the corner. Deep sleep may not have been possible and was discour-aged: They believed Christ’s Second Coming was imminent, and that He would come in the middle of the night. They rose at midnight to the sound of a bell, and processed, singing, to the Saal, which stood perpendicular and next to Saron. This was the meeting house used by the sisters; the brothers gathered in their own. In each they would watch, sing, and pray for two hours before returning to their wood benches for another three hours of uncomfortable sleep. Each kam-mer, in addition to the bench, contained a narrow built-in wardrobe, a wall-hung cabinet, and a shelf with pegs beneath. The furnishings of each cell are identical, as were the sisters’ white robes, fashioned after those of the Capuchins. Each mem-ber of the community (with the exception in some years of the prior and prioress) was equally provided for. The sisters were organized into three “choirs,” each with its own common room, around which the kammern, the individual cells, were

grouped. The walls of the common rooms were lined with benches identi-cal to those in the kammern, but longer, where the sisters might gather for time together. The Zion Brotherhood was simi-larly provisioned; their building was lost in 1908.

Each of the dormitory houses had a kitchen for the preparation of the one small vegetarian meal they ate each day. The Solitaries sat on benches like the one illustrated on page 24, drawn up to simple trestle tables to share their plain daily fare. Today this bench stands in Saron in such a setting. The leg profile, with its curving front, will be found again in benches from the Harmony Society, where they have been traced to their origins in Germany. The construction of Saron, a half-timbered building with dormers in the steep roof, also derives from traditional German architecture.

On Christmas and other special days in the community’s life, they gath-ered for Love Feasts in a large hall on the second floor of the Saal. The practice was adopted from the early Christian church, and ritual foot washing preceded the feast, which included the celebration of communion. It was the one occasion on which the community ate meat, specifi-cally a lamb stew. Sitting together on the long, fourteen-foot Feast Hall benches, with singers alternating up and down the table to facilitate their antipho-nal singing, the community celebrated their life together.

The long, plain Feast Hall bench can be seen as a symbol of this chosen

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w e s i t t o g e t h e r

sharing of a plain life together in a Christian “communism of intentional poverty.”1 The rigors of that intentional poverty stand in contrast to their spiritual life, which was rich in mystical symbol-ism, including those of song and feast; the community was, on occasion, accused of Catholic practices. The simple arches on the legs of the Feast Hall bench have small points at the top, a memory, as it were, of European medieval gothic, and a small equivalent in bench design to the frakturschiften in which the hymns were written down. The community’s belief in direct inspiration and transcen-dental visions was indeed perhaps closer to the medieval Catholic tradition of visionary saints than to the Lutheran faith in which Beissel had been raised.

Beissel introduced antiphonal sing-ing to the community and wrote many of the hymns. He taught the choirs of Sisters, who took all parts except for the bass. They sang with mouths half closed and heads tilted up, making, contem-porary reports tell us, an angelic sound (see Treher for a fuller description).2 The hymns were recorded in a notation also invented by Beissel, and written out in frakturschiften, an elaborate German decorated script reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The work was an act of devotion, and, as a celebration of their religious beliefs, it continued even after the community had developed a successful paper-making, printing and bookbinding business.

The economy of Ephrata, whose core was always self-sufficiency in agriculture,

included a gristmill and sawmill, and a number of crafts, besides the printing and associated businesses. It flowered for a time, but Beissel banished those who had spearheaded the successful economy on the grounds that they were leading the community away from its central religious purpose. Material ownership was seen as worldly, and their rejection of all pos-sessions extended to a refusal to take out a patent securing ownership of the land they had settled on the Cocalico Creek; a decision that came back to trouble them later. Their own chosen poverty they accompanied with generous charity to others—they gave away bread, ran a school for German children, and helped newly arrived neighbors to build homes.

The Solitaries at Ephrata Cloister led lives of prayer and meditation. From their hard bench beds they rose in the dark of night to watch for the coming of the light of the spirit. Following the lead of the early Christian church, they led a communal life that was materially poor but rich in the mystical life of the spirit. They celebrated their lives together on the long Feast Hall benches, benches that were plain but for a vestigial Gothic point at the head of each arched foot: a small physical sign of the larger unseen life.

1. E. G. Alderfer, The Ephrata Commune:

An Early American Counterculture

(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh,

1985), 66.

2. Charles M. Treher, Snow Hill Cloister

(Kutztown, PA: Pennsylvania German

Society, 1968), 61.

23


L-shaped sleeping bench in a kammer at the west end of the third floor of Saron. The ogee on the vertical end is present in only a few kammern, a plain chamfer is more common.

Saron, Saal, Ephrata Cloister Interior of a kammer, third floor west end of Saron, with L-shaped sleeping bench, Ephrata Cloister

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Refectory Bench, remade in poplar

Refectory Bench

25

Feast Hall Bench


Detail showing wedged-through tenon, Feast Hall Bench

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27

Feast Hall Bench, remade in poplar


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ThE ShakErS17 74 – P R E S E N T ( N O R T H A M E R I C A )

Schoolroom BenchMount Lebanon Meeting House Bench

Hancock Bench

We are not the Religious Society of

Furniture Makers.

—Brother Arnold Hadd, Sabbathday

Lake.

Brother Arnold Hadd is one of three full members of the Shakers still living today in the one remaining active Shaker community, which is located in the Maine countryside at Sabbathday Lake. He contests the prevailing public enthusi-asm for what he might call an imagined Shaker aesthetic, asserting rather that the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, as the Shakers call themselves, are and were pragmatic people with neither time nor concern for aesthetic matters. The schoolroom bench, dating from before 1890, and no longer

in use today, certainly supports his position.

The community at Sabbathday Lake first came together in 1783 and was formally organized in 1794. The schoolhouse, now the Shaker Library, was not built until 1890. Prior to that date, classes were held in various rooms in other buildings in the village, their location changing along with changing demands for available accommodation. In accordance with Shaker dictates on the separation of the sexes, boys and girls were not taught together, and they were even taught at different times of year as the boys needed to work in the fields during the summer months. The con-struction of the schoolroom bench, which was made in the time of the movable

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t h e s h a k e r s

schoolroom and no longer needed in the permanent schoolhouse, is light, strong, and easily moved and stored. It is an entirely practical solution to the specific functional requirements of this piece of furniture. The arches on the bottoms of the legs, while pleasing to our eyes, are a utilitarian design that provides the best workable size for the feet with one simple, sweeping cut. The diagonal braces, simply notched into seat and leg on this bench (compare with the dovetailed brace on the meetinghouse bench from Mount Lebanon), are of thinner lumber than the other parts, and dimensioned only large enough to do their job. But the most obvious evidence that design and execu-tion were dictated by pragmatism rather than aesthetics is the re-use of salvaged lumber; lumber that, moreover, was not refinished, but left as it came, partly painted and partly raw. Judging by the color, which matches that of the walls and benches in the meetinghouse, the lumber looks to have been previously used for interior walls, or even built-in benches, a supposition supported by it having been painted on one side only. The unpainted underside of the seat and the unpainted inner surface of one leg both bear marks showing where transverse pieces had been nailed in their previous use. When construction or changing use required the community to take down an existing structure in part or whole, the Shakers disassembled rather than demolished, and stored the lumber for future projects. This bench was put together from such lumber in a straightforward way without

so much as a rudimentary furniture finish—a matter of practicality over aesthetics.

The four fundamental principles of Shaker faith set out by their founder, Mother Ann Lee, are: the community of goods, the confession of sins, withdrawal from the world, and celibacy. Children came into the community either when a family joined as a whole, or as orphans, oftentimes voluntarily given up by strug-gling parents. Once a child reached adulthood he or she was free to choose whether to remain in the community or leave. The community at Sabbathday Lake received their last significant influx of children during the depression years in the 1930s. Sister Francis, a current member, came to the community as a ten-year-old in 1937.

To make the practice of celibacy easier there were firm rules governing interaction between the sexes, which included built and even specific mea-sured divisions. These include different entrances to buildings and separate benches in the meetinghouse. At Sabbathday Lake, where the meeting-house originally had partitioned internal staircases as well as gendered entrances, the built-in benches along the walls are divided in the center of the room by a space of just over three feet. The meeting room was designed, and perhaps built, by Brother Moses Johnson in 1794, the ninth of ten for which he is responsible. The interior colors follow, though not precisely, those laid out in the Millennial Laws set down in 1821. Typically, the

30


center of the meeting room was left open allowing for the active, and, as Dolores Hayden points out, nonlinear form of worship that gave the Shakers their name. 1 At Mount Lebanon (the central ministry of the Shakers) the light though sturdy construction of the meetinghouse benches allowed for them to be easily moved out of the way for active worship; a functionality that occurs again in the Sabbathday Lake schoolroom bench. At Sabbathday Lake the floor of the meeting room was, however, occupied by benches in the summer months. In these warm months the community held a public Sunday service in the unheated meetinghouse; on weekdays and in winter they worshipped privately in a room in the residence. These additional benches are arranged in rows facing each other across the center of the room at a dis-tance of five feet, this being the specific measurement laid down for separation between the sexes in this context. These benches are of a typical American settee pattern with spindles and a broad top rail forming the back. They are similar to those at Oneida, though these are of a blond color and were bought from an outside manufacturer in Waterville, Maine. The purchased benches are a good example of Shaker pragmatism: When it was more practical to make something themselves they did so, yet when it was more practical to buy from an outside source, saving their own labor for other tasks, then that is what they did.

Brother Arnold Hadd tells the story of the dining tables at Sabbathday

Lake. In the dining room the brothers and sisters sit at tables on opposite sides of the room. Workers and guests join the brothers and sisters at the appropri-ate table (the pragmatism of the Shakers extended to hiring workers when tasks could not be completed by members alone). A bell is rung ten minutes before mealtimes, allowing the community to gather in the separate waiting rooms. Shakers are extremely prompt and all are gathered and ready when the meal buzzer is sounded. At Sabbathday Lake the community sits for meals on chairs, not benches. Brother Arnold explained that this allows those who finish eating first to rise and get on with their day’s work without disturbing others—a matter of expediency over worldly conventions. “We are a bench-less community,” Brother Arnold told me. The tables in use in the dining room today were built by Brother Delmer Wilson in the 1920s. When the enthusiasm for collecting historic Shaker furniture was in its full vogue, Brother Delmer—on obtaining an appraisal on the late-eighteenth- century dining room tables original to the room—decided it made sense to sell them, thereby obtaining valuable income for the community, and make new ones himself. The new tables would be equally serviceable to the community, but would not have the antique value so prized by the world. In an example of furniture design embodying community structure, Brother Delmer made the nosing of the tops different for the brothers’ than from the sisters’ tables.

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t h e s h a k e r s

The Sabbathday Lake schoolroom bench has one other feature that perfectly embodies Shaker philosophy, and it is the plainest of all: The joints are rein-forced with wire nails. The bench will have been made at sometime prior to the building of the schoolhouse in 1890. That date, 1890, is sometimes given as the approximate date for the introduction of the wire nail to common use in the United States. We do know the Shakers were ahead of the technological curve. Sister Tabitha Babbitt, for example, invented the circular saw, so it is entirely possible

they adopted wire nails early. Or it may be that the bench was reinforced—repaired, perhaps—in more recent times. Whichever the case, the nails securing the legs to the top are all spaced exactly two inches apart with exactly one half-inch between the outermost and the edge of the seat. Perfect order, even for a few wire nails.

1. Dolores Hayden, Seven American

Utopias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979),

69–71.

Interior of Meeting House, Sabbathday Lake Meeting House Benches, Sabbathday Lake. The sexes are separated by a space of just over three feet.

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Schoolroom Bench

Schoolroom Bench photographed in the Meeting House, Sabbathday Lake

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t h e s h a k e r s

Benches remade in poplar after ones at Hancock

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Meeting House Bench remade in poplar after one at Mount Lebanon

Meeting House, Mount Lebanon

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Detail of Meeting House Bench, remade in poplar, Mount Lebanon

t h e s h a k e r s

We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from the Shakers to the Separatists of Zoar

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