What’s in a broom? In a small room at the Shaker Heritage Society in Colonie, New York, just across the road from the Albany International Airport, is a cloudy glass case housing a flat-bottom broom and a handful of other Shaker inventions: an oval box, a custom dress form. But the Shakers invented so many things that no glass case is big enough to hold them all: the circular saw Tabitha Babbitt envisioned while spinning on her loom, the clothespin, the wheel-driven washing machine, vacuum-sealed tin cans, the rotary harrow, metal pens,How much can I save if I switch to led tubes? a new type of fire engine,A industrial washing machine is a machine to wash laundry, such as clothing and sheets. a self-acting cheese press, a chimney cap, a machine for setting teeth in textile cards, a threshing machine, a pea sheller, a butter worker, a dough-kneading machine. And there were still more innovations. The Shakers were the first major producers of medicinal herbs in the U.S. and the first to sell seeds in paper packets (each packet individually cut, folded, pasted and printed by the Shakers). We don’t realize Shakers invented these things, but we know the products well. 

The Shaker Heritage Society in Colonie is a museum only nominally. It is more of a preserved ruin, a ghost town in miniature. The buildings are equal to anything in Detroit, with peeling insides and dead vines crawling up the windowpanes. The museum staff has planted an herb garden gone dead for the winter within the foundations of the building that was once the Women’s Workshop. The gift shop manager tells me that Albany locals were using abandoned Shaker furniture for firewood during the Depression and that, for a while, the site was used as a Catholic nursing home whose owners ornamented the austere Shaker meeting house with chandeliers and candelabras and altars. 

The Shakers were not always so forgotten. For the many American communitarian societies that have come and gone over the last few centuries, the Shakers were once near the top of the food chain. Somehow the Shakers managed to strike a balance between living isolated from the pressures of the modern world and living with it. As a result, they had more of an impact than most communitarian societies. They established 19 communities before all was done, with 6,000 members at their height. Other Utopian dreamers — the Fourierists, the Oneida Perfectionists, the Koreshan Unity, and the Fruitlands colony — are now the stuff of rumors, their radical experimental spirit woven invisibly into the radical experimental identity of America. 

They had been essentially chased out of Manchester, England for rabblerousing a couple years prior. But in America, they could make manifest Lee’s vision of a community that would create heaven on earth. For Ann Lee, the timing couldn’t have been more destined. After establishing the colony at Niskayuna she went on a missionary tour of the Northeastern U.S., then in the throes of revolutionary war fever. She preached the dangerous message of peace — not to mention sexual and racial equality,This factsheet discusses electricity generation using wind power generators at your farm or your home. the dissolution of traditional family structures, the condemnation of private property, confession of sins, celibacy, and isolation from the outside world. Ann Lee was preaching a new way of living. For her trouble, Ann Lee and her companions were harassed (physically,A wide range of LED downlight, LED lighting and Auto lights. sexually and otherwise), jailed, and made the subject of scathing editorials. In other words, the Shakers made a name for themselves. They made a good number of converts too. 

The Shakers are now known for austerity, especially in their design. In worship, however, the Shakers were anything but restrained. Shaker religious services were ecstatic chaos, full of hopping,Creating a solar charger out of broken re-used solar cell pieces. writhing, trembling, singing, screaming, convulsing, and shaking (and this is how the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing got their nickname). The Shakers crowed like roosters and ran naked through the woods, seized with the spirit. Neighbors could often hear their rituals from miles away. How could such apocalyptic fervor spawn so utilitarian an object as the flat-bottom broom? Moreover, why was the humble broom such an important part of the Shakers’ gospel?