We Sit Together : Utopian Benches From the Shakers to The Separatists of Zoar [1 ed.] 9781616891596

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We Sit Together

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East 7th Street New York, New York 10003 Visit our website at www.papress.com © 2013 Francis Cape All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 16 15 14 13 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. 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

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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

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

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Communities & Benches —

Ephrata Cloister 20

The Shakers 28

Snow Hill Nunnery 36

Harmony Society 40

Society of Separatists OF Zoar 46

Oneida Perfectionists 52

Community of True Inspiration in Amana 56

Hutterites 66

Rose Valley 72

Bruderhof (Woodcrest Community) 78

Twin Oaks 82

Camphill Village Kimberton Hills 88

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Bibliography

Installation

Image Credits

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Acknowledgments

Museum Commission; Old Economy Village, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission; Zoar Village State Memorial, Zoar Community Association and the Ohio Historical Society; Oneida Community Mansion House; and Amana Heritage Society. I also thank: William Ayres, who transported a bench to New York for my use. Special thanks go to Richard Torchia, director of Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, Pennsylvania whose enthusiasm and initiative helped get the project off the ground, and whose support saw the work through to its first exhibition. Daniel Fuller at the ICA at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and Ian Berry and Rachel Seligman at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, have curated many new gatherings on the benches. Throughout I depended shamelessly on the support of Liza Phillips.

My research for both this book and the sculpture that preceded it—particularly the visiting and measuring of benches— was made possible by the generous participation of both living communal societies and the custodians of the heritage of those past. For the living, I thank the communities that agreed to my intrusion and the individuals who were my guides: Mimi Coleman at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills; Sean Purl Samoheyl at Twin Oaks; Brother Arnold Hadd of the Shaker Community at Sabbathday Lake and Leonard L. Brooks, Director of the Library and Museum at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village; and the Bruderhof, Woodcrest Community. The custodians of our past who gave their time and knowledge are too numerous to name individually. The institutions they represent, and to which they made me welcome, are Ephrata Cloister, Pennsylvania Historical and

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Foreword R ichard T orchia

Cape mentioned a group of new works he had begun recently, a set of benches based on examples from intentional communities, but for which he had not yet established what he felt to be an appropriate context. I found his description of this project intriguing because it posed such a contradiction to his usual way of working. For many years, Cape’s practice had been identified with a rigorous form of site-specificity in which the dimensions of his constructed objects were derived from their presentational contexts and often built directly into them. Works such as 258 Main St. (2002, for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut) or Waterline (2006, first presented at the Murray Guy gallery, New York City), had

Apprenticed to a wood carver in England before becoming a sculptor, Francis Cape has made craftsmanship and the history of architectural and furniture design central to his work. Home Front (2009) his last major project, focused on the 1940s British Utility Furniture Scheme, a successor to the Arts and Crafts movement. It was his subsequent research into the American Arts and Crafts and the history of social idealism that served as the impetus for Utopian Benches, the endeavor documented by We Sit Together. I first learned about Cape’s benches at a lecture he gave at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in the summer of 2010 at the invitation of artist Eileen Neff. During the discussion following his talk,

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Fo r e w o r d

the United States in the first place. Given Cape’s interest in the local, Arcadia became an ideal place to present the benches and launch them on the tour we began to envision. The exhibition opened in early November 2010 and at the time, a hundred miles north, the developments at Zuccotti Park and the emergence of the Occupy movement served as a powerful reminder of our freedom to gather and the need for public spaces to discuss and dissent. That these conversations and protests focused on the alarming inequities of the distribution of wealth within the beleaguered US economy pointed to another essential motivation of Cape’s project. Among the many objectives of We Sit Together is a desire to address the legacy of resistance to capitalistdriven individualism that formed the founding ideals of American groups once referred to as “communisms” and “socialisms.” As such, the benches advocate ways in which an increasingly outmoded category of furniture might be instrumental in exploring the importance of community and collective ownership. Paradoxically, each example of Cape’s unpainted, historic recreations suggests both an appropriated “ready-made”as well as a newly minted prototype, an interpretation supported by the many measured drawings Cape has rendered expressly for this publication. Consequently, this book serves not only as a guide for individual readers to reenact Cape’s own

a convincing way of appearing as if they had always been a part of the room in which they were encountered, whether installed in a contemporary white cube or a historic building. This temporal and spatial dislocation, a distinguishing feature of Cape’s practice, is elegantly reconfigured in Utopian Benches. A few weeks following the lecture, Cape sent me some photographs of the first four benches he had made. I was taken by their sculptural presence and excited by the challenge of finding a meaningful setting for them. Cape and I began to consider how the benches could be exhibited at Arcadia University Art Gallery, which we came to realize was well situated to accommodate his project. Located in Glenside, Pennsylvania, the gallery is a forty-five minute drive from Ephrata Cloister, the earliest intentional community in the United States with a craft tradition and in possession of a bench Cape had long planned to measure and reconstruct. In addition to its proximity to the furniture traditions of the Pennsylvania Germans, the gallery is also within the compass of Camphill Village, Kimberton Hills, Pennsylvania, the most recently established of the communities represented in Cape’s project and still active as a commune with a craft tradition. Most significantly, however, the campus is only twelve miles from Center City, Philadelphia, the historic site of the Quakers who were instrumental in fostering the religious freedom that drew so many of the communal societies to

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elevated to chair height—an unforeseen fusion of seat, desk, and table. During the discussions I attended hierarchies were obliterated and any perceived “center”—as occupied by any speaker— was momentary and shifting, not unlike the way that Merce Cunningham described his choreography. The many conversations the benches enabled thus offered singular experiences that animated, if not reinvented, the dynamics of the group discussion. It is important to mention another transformation generated by the exhibition of the benches at Arcadia in keeping with Cape’s goals of creating open discourse. Housed in a renovated power plant (designed by architect Horace Trumbauer and built in 1893), the gallery has a pitched roof that rises thirty-three feet above the floor. In the early 1980s, three of the room’s five original arched windows were covered with sheetrock to create additional interior wall space. On this first visit to the gallery Cape noticed the sealed windows and asked that they be exposed while the benches were on view. I happily agreed, excited by the prospect of restoring the room’s original relationship to natural light. We could not anticipate, however, the manner in which unblocking the three windows transformed the gallery into a space resembling a nineteenth-century meetinghouse. The ability to see the benches—and how they were being used—from outside the building established a transparency appropriate to the social idealism espoused by the project.

reconstructions but as an incentive for possible action. Studied from the vantage point offered by sitting on one of the benches, the twenty sculptures— with the countless differences of their exposed facture and design unified by their rendering in poplar milled near Cape’s studio—readily evoke the accumulated aspirations that helped shape them. Built to last, it is difficult not to speculate about the futures before them. The pleasure of exhibiting these benches came with a charge from Cape that they be used to facilitate public discussions at each location at which they were subsequently presented. Following a format established by the Quakers, these public, group conversations were focused on topics pertinent to the project, including “utopia,” “the local,” “community,” and “the value of things,” as well as subjects determined by personnel and faculty at each venue. Cape’s decision to arrange the benches at each exhibition so that they would face each other, as opposed to a dais or altar, posed a challenge to some discussion leaders at first, but ultimately served to encourage engagement. The fact that Cape appropriated benches that have no backs, a feature Cape believed might have suggested associations with pews, allows participants the opportunity to turn their bodies in any direction, thus increasing the capacity for engagement. In many ways, the “gathering” (Cape’s term to describe the benches’ presentation as a group) suggests the individual planks of a floor

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Fo r e w o r d

practice” that successfully engages its participants without sacrificing the attributes of the art object. Despite the rigor of the conceptual framework that Cape has created for them and the rich legacy to which they allude, it is the benches’ integrity as well-crafted pieces of wood furniture that can be used by their viewers to activate their collective legacies and ensure their future.

For those familiar with the gallery space, the newly opened windows offered a disorienting surprise that contributed to the welcoming impression made by the furniture. In the afternoons of bright days, sunlight warmed the poplar and scented the gallery with the fragrance of linseed oil with which Cape had varnished the wood. Following the closure of the exhibition, the windows disappeared once again behind the walls despite pleas from many viewers to keep them open permanently. Developed as a touring project, Utopian Benches traveled to the ICA at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. At the ICA, the benches were contextualized by numerous events, including the popular annual conference of the Furniture Society and a conversation between Cape and Brother Arnold Hadd, one of the last three living Shakers. A resident of Sabbathday Lake, this Shaker Village was the source of a new bench that Cape added to the group for its presentation at the ICA. At Skidmore, which will be hosting the benches through May 2013, the gathering creates an active meeting space within a year-long exhibition exploring the United States Constitution, further enlivened by the discourse prompted by the 2012 presidential election and all it has precipitated. Ultimately, Cape’s Utopian Benches offers a welcome example of “social

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Utopian Benches installed at Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2011

Group conversation on the Utopian Benches at Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2011

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Introduction

Twenty benches are gathered in the middle of a room. Each is built from poplar and finished in the same rubbed linseed oil. No two are the same. This is the sculpture Utopian Benches. I made the sculpture as a way of thinking—and talking—about communalism as both a historic and a contemporary alternative to individualism. The definition of communalism I use here is the community of goods. Broader definitions such as that suggested by Timothy Miller  do not make as clear a distinction from materialist individualism.1 Sharing a bench means sharing the same material support; also sitting at the same level. When gathered in a room for exhibition, the benches are used for public meetings and conversations on subjects chosen by those

who have chosen to come. Leaders or moderators, if present, sit with the others on the benches; they do not address the group from outside. I made the benches using measured drawings taken from original benches that were, for the most part, made for and/or used by communal societies. Each bench is a facsimile of one used and, in some cases, currently in use by a communal society. The originals are in a variety of woods and finishes. I chose to make them all in poplar sourced locally near my studio, as using locally available lumber is what they did. The linseed oil finish is characteristic of early Shaker furniture. My research took me from historic sites and museum villages to contemporary communes, both secular and religious.

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the craftsmen and women were not respected by their peers, but that for craft, as for communalism, it is the contribution rather than the contributor that is celebrated. The benches, as shared seating, represent community. As examples of craftsmanship, they propose a reconsideration of value. The intentional association of craft with resistance to industrial practice—and in our times to mass consumption—dates to the nineteenth century with William Morris and the origins of the Arts and Crafts movement in Great Britain. Morris, who is best known for his naturalistic textile and wallpaper designs, also ran a furniture shop whose products followed simple English rural vernacular traditions, in sharp contrast to the opulent output of conventional designers of the day. He was, moreover, an active socialist who spoke regularly to workingmen’s groups and advocated the overthrow of the social and political order of his time: an order that has changed little in the Western world in the ensuing years. He had been a poet before he took up designing for the material world, and he described his dream of a new life in his utopian novel News from Nowhere. Morris and his utopian vision, became the model for the Arts and Crafts community founded at Rose Valley outside Philadelphia (fifty miles from Ephrata Cloister, in the opposite direction from the Camphill Village). We Sit Together proposes not such deliberate politicization of craft (except

The focus of the work is the nineteenth-century American intentional communities, particularly those with a craft tradition, most famously the Shakers, but also the Community of True Inspiration in Amana, the Harmony Society, and the Society of Separatists at Zoar, Ohio. The earliest benches are from Ephrata Cloister, which was established in 1732, and is the oldest American communal society for which we have extant buildings and artifacts, now in the care of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The newest bench was made sometime in the last ten years at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, which is also in southeast Pennsylvania and less than fifty miles from Ephrata. This newest bench stands in Rose Hall, which is the meetinghouse at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills. It is built from oak, which was likely sourced from the community’s woodlands. Though built in living memory, the name of the individual who made it is already lost; that this could have happened is owed to the community’s dependence on a continuing rotation of short-term coworkers. The story of the bench reflects the structure of the community. At Ephrata Cloister, the Feast Hall bench—which probably also stood in the Saal, the community meeting house, in an upstairs room where they held Love Feasts—will also have been built from local lumber. The name of that maker is lost in time. That the name of neither maker was recorded is characteristic of the anonymity of traditional craft practice. This is not to say that

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introduction

consequently were attracted to the religious freedom offered by William Penn. Many were helped along their way by the Quakers in Philadelphia. While a few had adopted communal life in Europe before emigrating, most chose it as a way to better handle the difficulties and challenges of their new world. In particular, the well-being—and indeed, survival—of the elderly, the infirm, and the poor was given as a reason for throwing their lot together. Many, such as the Hutterites and the Bruderhof, who practiced communalism in Europe, as well as some of those who adopted it in the New World (the Separatists of Zoar among them), specifically name the community of goods in the early Christian Apostolic church as the model for their own practice. In the case of the Hutterites, the sharing of possessions in emulation of that earlier example is integral to their faith: To leave the community is to leave the shelter of the church. Community of property in almost all societies meant individual property was limited to a few personal items. Members were provided with everything they needed, from home and food, to health care and education. They usually lived in communal houses, but with private rooms or suites. In return they worked at tasks often appointed by community leaders, and even if skilled in a particular trade, would take up any appointed task as season or need demanded. Contemporary accounts tell of the pleasures of such communal working groups that were called bees at Oneida

in the case of Rose Valley) but that material culture reflects social structure, and that the bench as shared seating reflects a general sharing of values, but also that the design and use of a bench in a communal society reflects— to some degree, at least—the structure and values of that particular community. The description of each community is here told, so far as possible, through its bench or benches. While adequate to their purpose, such descriptions are not exhaustive and the reader is referred to the bibliography for fuller accounts. Communities are ordered chronologically according to the date they were established in North America. Accompanying each community description are measured drawings and photographs of each bench. If so moved, the reader will be able to remake a bench for themselves, and perhaps even a commune. In America the history of resistance to capitalist-driven individualism is older than either William Morris or Karl Marx. It is embedded in those groups once referred to by their American contemporaries as “communisms” and “socialisms.” The high point for American communitarianism is commonly regarded to be the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Many communal societies from that time, along with some both earlier and later, share similar histories and characteristics. Historically, they left Europe to escape religious persecution, often as German Pietists denounced by the dominant Lutheran church, and

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myth, is not a hotbed of free love, though they do not particularly revere conventional marriage. It was the outwardly bourgeois Oneida Perfectionists who, in the latter part of the nineteenth century—a period generally dominated by conventional mores—enjoyed sexual freedom in an arrangement they called “complex marriage.” Throughout their history, communication, aid, and the exchange of ideas and even members between communities has been common. In the 1780s Matthias Hofer fell out with his Hutterite community in Russia and traveled to America to join Ephrata Cloister. One hundred years later the Tripp colony of Hutterites in South Dakota, facing financial difficulties, appealed to the Community of True Inspiration in Amana for assistance, which they received. When it became clear they still could not manage, they sold up and moved to Pennsylvania to settle on land given to them by the Harmony Society. It has been suggested the Harmonists, faced with their own crisis in the form of dwindling membership, hoped to make these Hutterites their heirs. 3 Over time the single largest common cause for the demise of communal societies has been the attraction of a younger generation to the pursuit of individual material wealth offered by the larger world. The Amana Inspirationists, who saw it happening, chose to abandon communal living rather than watch their children leave. Like

and parties by Christiana Knoedler, in her writings on the Harmony Society. 2 Many did not see work as drudgery, but took pride in what they did, resulting in craft legacies valued to this day. New members were often required to sign contracts giving over all their worldly possessions to the community in return for a lifetime of support. Sometimes a record was kept of what they had brought with them, and if they subsequently left, it would be returned, though without interest. Several societies suffered lawsuits from disgruntled former communards who wanted recompense for the labor they had performed. Membership contracts were designed to protect communities from such suits. Some had written constitutions, and almost all were incorporated under state law as communal societies. In the late 1970s, Twin Oaks won a court case allowing them to be taxed under a federal law established over a century earlier for the Shakers. Celibacy, for which the Shakers are well known, was rarely absolute in other communities. It was adopted by the Harmony Society two or three years after their incorporation, and though it became the custom for the majority, some marriages and births were recorded. The Society of True Inspiration in Amana also thought it pleasing to the Lord, but did not require it. The Separatists of Zoar practiced if for a few hard years as they struggled to establish themselves on their new land. As to promiscuity: the sixties commune, Twin Oaks, contrary to popular

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introduction

In the end, those groups that succeeded in surviving the first difficult years often flourished and did better than their individualist neighbors—often much to the latters’ chagrin. Indeed in the mid-twentieth century the Hutterites in one Canadian province were legally barred from buying more land because their success in agriculture far outstripped the achievements of neighboring individual family farms. Contemporary societies, of which there are four in this book, are so far surviving and continuing successfully; the Hutterites particularly so. New communities continue to be formed, and it is possible that current disgust with money and politics will lead—or perhaps is already leading— to a new communal movement.

the Oneida Perfectionists, they divided the community’s property between themselves, which, in the case of their successful businesses, took the form of stock. Descendants of both, some of whom still live in former community housing, continue to receive income from the Amana Society (which owned Amana Refrigeration) and Oneida Limited (the maker of silverware), respectively. Celibacy, despite what one might expect, did not on its own close communities. The Shakers, who were always entirely celibate, are still active, if only just, with three full members living together over two hundred years after communal living was established at Sabbathday Lake in Maine in 1783 (nine years after Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, landed in New York from England). By comparison, the Amana Inspirationists lasted seventy-seven years, and the Oneida Perfectionists just thirty-three. For the Harmony Society, who encouraged—but did not mandate— celibacy, it was their reluctance in later years to accept new members, their loss of religious and communal focus in favor of business success, and the desertion of a third of their members (particularly the young) following a leadership challenge, that were as much to blame for the society’s demise as celibacy itself. Secular contemporary communities, including both Twin Oaks and Camphill Village Kimberton Hills described here, manage with a high turnover of short-term members alongside their longer-term and lifetime communards.

1. Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), xxii–xxiv. 2. Christiana Knoedler, The Harmony Society (Great Barrington, MA: Vantage Press, 1954), 133. 3. Karl J. Arndt, quoted in John A. Hostetler, Hutterite Society (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1997), 123.

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communities –&– Benches

Ephrata Cloister 17 3 2 – 17 9 6

Sleeping Bench, Saron Refectory Bench Feast Hall Bench

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 promised 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 community. Beissel established two Orders of Solitaries, composed of brothers and

The fourth earliest communal society in recorded American history, and the earliest in this book, Ephrata Cloister is also the earliest American communal society for which we have extant material culture. Several buildings along with some of their furniture and furnishings are preserved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The brothers and sisters of Ephrata Cloister were mystics who practiced an ascetic communism. They slept on wood benches with wood blocks for pillows, and rose at midnight 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 dormitory houses, special days were marked with the celebration of Love Feasts, when

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grouped. The walls of the common rooms were lined with benches identical to those in the kammern, but longer, where the sisters might gather for time together. The Zion Brotherhood was similarly 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 gathered 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, specifically a lamb stew. Sitting together on the long, fourteen-foot Feast Hall benches, with singers alternating up and down the table to facilitate their antiphonal singing, the community celebrated their life together. The long, plain Feast Hall bench can be seen as a symbol of this chosen

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 celibates; 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 discouraged: 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 kammer, 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 member 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

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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 possessions 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.

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 symbolism, 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 transcendental 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 singing 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, contemporary 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,

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.

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

Saron, Saal, Ephrata Cloister

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.

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Refectory Bench

Refectory Bench, remade in poplar

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Detail showing wedged-through tenon, Feast Hall Bench

Feast Hall Bench

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

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e p h r ata c lo i s t e r

Feast Hall Bench, remade in poplar

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The Shakers 1 7 7 4 – present ( N orth A merica )

Schoolroom Bench Mount Lebanon Meeting House Bench Hancock Bench

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 construction of the schoolroom bench, which was made in the time of the movable

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 enthusiasm 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

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The shakers

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 struggling 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 measured divisions. These include different entrances to buildings and separate benches in the meetinghouse. At Sabbathday Lake, where the meetinghouse 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

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 execution 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

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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 appropriate 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-eighteenthcentury 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.

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 distance 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

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The shakers

The Sabbathday Lake schoolroom bench has one other feature that perfectly embodies Shaker philosophy, and it is the plainest of all: The joints are reinforced 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 halfinch between the outermost and the edge of the seat. Perfect order, even for a few wire nails.

Interior of Meeting House, Sabbathday Lake

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

1. Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 69–71.

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Schoolroom Bench

Schoolroom Bench photographed in the Meeting House, Sabbathday Lake

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The shakers

Benches remade in poplar after ones at Hancock

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Meeting House, Mount Lebanon

Meeting House Bench remade in poplar after one at Mount Lebanon

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The shakers

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

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Snow Hill Nunnery 17 9 8 – 18 8 9

Dining Room Bench

Creek that had been started by George Martin with the blessing of Ephrata Cloister. It was Martin’s successor, Peter Lehman who—with the strong support of Andreas’s wife, Barbara—advocated for and started celibate communal life in the farmhouse. At first there were just two brothers, Peter and Andreas, and two sisters, Barbara and her sister Elizabeth. As the community expanded new buildings were constructed. The first, in 1814, was the sisters’ house, a twostory brick building measuring forty by thirty feet. This was then joined to the stone farmhouse by one of similar size and construction, which held a new communal dining room on the first floor, and the saal, or meeting room, above. In 1838 the old farmhouse was demolished

Snow Hill Nunnery was a daughter community of Ephrata Cloister. It was smaller and simpler than its parent. The opening of a communal dining room in a stone farmhouse marked the beginning of communal life there. It ended ninety-one years later with the closing of the refectory in the central section of the long brick communal building. This simple dining room bench was probably made about the middle years of communal living at Snow Hill. The original stone farmhouse was built by Andreas Snowberger in 1793 (his German name Schneeberger, meaning “snow hill,” had been partially anglicized and gave its name to the place and to the community). He was a member of the lay congregation along the Antietam

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Miller in 1796, was continued at Snow Hill, which started in 1798, its practice at the latter was simpler and less rigorous. Celibate brothers and sisters lived communally, but shared lives that were more like those of the lay congregation than had been the case at Ephrata. They slept through the night, ate regular meals, and eschewed the fasting and special diets of the parent community. Title to the land was held by the Seventh Day Baptists of Snow Hill, which included the lay congregation; the monastic order was separately incorporated in law in 1834. Five trustees were elected to four-year terms from both the cloister and the congregation. Besides running temporal affairs, the trustees chose the vorsteher, or spiritual leader, who was not necessarily from the cloister. As for the benches, community structure was uniform, but allowed for variation. The economic life of the community, as Treher describes, “was partially communal, partially capitalistic, and partially a bartering of goods and services.” 3 The communal orders shared all income equally and any property brought by new members accrued to the cloister (although a record was kept and it could be returned if the member left). Daily tasks were assigned each morning as they sat together for breakfast on benches like this one. Their flour mill and cooper shop were their most commercially successful industries. Others, such as the cabinet shop, produced mostly for their own use. Snow Hill was called the Nunnery after the plain dress of the sisters,

and replaced by a wing for the brothers. The resulting finished building was over one hundred feet long and contained about fifty kammern and nine communal rooms. Unlike at Ephrata Cloister, the kammern did not have narrow board sleeping benches, but beds that were standard for the day, having interlaced ropes supporting chaff ticks. Furniture in the communal living rooms included comfortable rockers, straight chairs, grandfather clocks, as well as benches. 1 Treher records that in the first communal dining room in the stone farmhouse there had been two tables, with the sexes sitting separately. The same was true in the second, larger communal dining room, where plain benches were arranged along each side of the two long tables. This bench was probably one of them. The dining room bench is not only simple, it is of a standard design and construction for everyday rural benches of the mid-nineteenth century. Judging from available photographs of benches from Snow Hill, there were many small variations in design on a standard structure of legs mortised into the seat and skirts nailed to both sides. Dimensions, however, varied significantly. The longest recorded bench was fifteen and a half feet long and had three legs. 2 Benches in the saal, on the other hand, were similar to those in the saal at Ephrata Cloister: They were made of oak and had backs and arms. While the legacy of Ephrata Cloister, which closed with the death of Peter

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will have been added later, when the community was at its height in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Its plain design and standard structure reflect the simplicity and regularity of life at Snow Hill compared to that of Ephrata Cloister. It did not leave the shared house until over one hundred years after communal living had ceased there. Although much of Snow Hill’s material heritage passed into private hands at auction in 1997, the invaluable collection of manuscripts was saved through the intercession of Denise Seachrist for Juniata College’s Beeghly Library in Pennsylvania.

which was worn with a white handkerchief pinned over the shoulders and a large bonnet. They could be seen every Sabbath processing with the brothers across the creek to the lay meetinghouse. The meetinghouse, which had been built in 1825 to accommodate the expanding lay congregation, had separate entry doors and was divided by a central partition. It included a large oven for the preparation of Love Feasts. The tradition of singing and fraktur continued at Snow Hill, but was less ethereal and less ornate. The one feature unique to Snow Hill was in the attic prayer room of the communal house where a section of hinged roof, equipped with balanced weights, allowed the occupants to pray under the stars. 4 Repairs carried out in the 1950s sealed the roof. After the death of the last brother, Obed Snowberger, in 1895, the property remained under the trusteeship of the lay congregation. To this day the Seventh Day Baptist congregation continues the tradition of welcoming members of neighboring congregations to Love Feasts held on the first Sunday in June, in the same meetinghouse on the same plain oak benches. Regrettably, the cost of upkeep of the buildings obliged the congregation to sell the contents of the communal house at auction in 1997. This bench was included in that auction. The beginning of communal life at Snow Hill was marked by four brothers and sisters sitting together in the communal dining room in Andreas Snowberger’s stone farmhouse. This particular bench

1. Charles M. Treher, Snow Hill Cloister (Kutztown, PA: Pennsylvania German Society, 1968), 47. 2. Horst Auction House Sale Catalog, August 11, 1997. 3. Treher, 65. 4. Denise A. Seachrist, Snow Hill: In the Shadows of the Ephrata Cloister (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), 15.

Snow Hill Nunnery

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Dining Room Bench, Snow Hill Nunnery

Dining Room Bench, remade in poplar

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Harmony Society 18 0 5 – 19 0 5

Feast Hall Bench Garden Bench

Old Economy was at the time of its construction the largest unbroken span in North America. Both the hall and the bench, therefore, embraced the largest gathering possible. Philip D. Zimmerman describes the hall as used to hold “communal meetings, designed in part to afford a time to eliminate differences within the group and to strengthen the bonds that held these people together.” 1 Meetings were held on special days in the community and Christian calendars, such as February 15, the date of the founding of the society, Easter, and Christmas. Dinner, brought up from the communal kitchen, was served with their own wine, and followed by a concert performed by the society band and singers.

The members of the Harmony Society were millennialists who believed that Jesus Christ would return to earth within their lifetime and usher in a thousandyear kingdom of peace on earth. In preparation, they sought to approach heaven on earth by embracing beauty and harmony in their lives. The Feast Hall bench was used when they gathered together in celebration of their communal lives and shared faith; the garden bench when they paused from their work to enjoy the beauty of this world. The exceptional length of the Feast Hall bench, like that of the Feast Hall bench from Ephrata Cloister, can be thought of as a symbol of the gathering together of the whole community at one seating. The roof of the Feast Hall at

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on page 43 “originally in the garden at Old Economy.” The origins of the Harmonists in Württemberg, Germany, are evident in the traditional profile of the front of the legs on both the Harmony benches included here; and of the association of this decorative front profile with the plain straight back. The latter suggests the design originates from benches that were used with their backs against a wall, a feature that was retained even when the bench was away from a wall. The benches in the Feast Hall, were drawn up on either side of tables of the same length, probably in two or three rows down the length of the hall. Records indicate there were between thirty-eight and eighty-two tables in the Feast Hall at Old Economy. Christiana Knoedler, who was born to Harmonist parents in the last years of the society, relates that men and women sat at tables on opposite sides of a central aisle in the Feast Hall. 3 The seating pattern reflects the practice of celibacy, which was adopted in the early years of the society at the behest of the young. Married members continued to share the same house, but were encouraged to live as brother and sister. That the practice was not universal is apparent from records of marriages, such as that of Rapp’s son, Johannes, in 1807, coincidentally the year celibacy was adopted by the majority, as well as the fact of Christiana’s own birth. The original members of the Harmony Society had left Germany to escape

Aside from these special days, meals were cooked and eaten in the mostly two-story brick homes in the village. The homes were arranged on a grid of streets, each housed four to six adults, usually family members, and had a vegetable garden and outbuildings for livestock. Other needs were distributed from the main store and the butcher. There was a communal washhouse supplied with steam heat, as were the houses, workshops, and factories. Plain benches like the Feast Hall bench were not found in homes, where square-back benches or settles may have been used (there is one on display at Old Economy Village in the home called the Baker’s House). By contrast, the Harmonists’ everyday clothing was plain, but on Sundays and feast days they dressed in fine silk garments made from the highquality silk produced by the society. Their appreciation of the fine things of this world extended from music and song, through the arts, to the beauty of nature. There was a museum of fine paintings, antiquities, and curios on the first floor of the Feast Hall building. They kept a communal flower garden, deer park, and a maze that symbolized the difficulty of reaching Harmony. The grotto sited in the communal garden between the Rapp House and the Ohio River was symbolic of man: It matters not how homely he is without, so that he be beautiful within.2 There were circular benches under an old linden tree nearby.  Notes in the Old Economy Village curator’s book place the curved bench shown

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While the decision to adopt communal life was driven by the straitened circumstances they initially found themselves in, the choice to continue with it for another one hundred years reflected their preference for the riches of heaven over those of the material world, and their enjoyment of the riches of community over the pursuit of individual wealth. The long Feast Hall bench, a seat shared with fellow communitarians, and its place in the large embrace of the Feast Hall, where the pleasures of fellowship were celebrated with fine food and wine, symbolizes their choice of the wealth of community life over that of the individual. The curved garden bench, likely shaded by the spreading linden tree, was a little piece of their heaven on earth.

religious persecution under the Lutherans. They came to Pennsylvania, where they had the promise of both religious freedom and help from existing German communities in Philadelphia. They established the town of Harmony in western Pennsylvania, and it was there in 1805, under the leadership of Johann Georg Rapp, that they founded the Harmony Society, placing all their goods in common. The articles of association required each member to contribute all they had, to pledge cooperation, and to agree to accept no pay. In return, they were to receive all the necessities of life. The Harmonists moved twice more, settling finally in Economy, Pennsylvania in 1825. Through all their moves their furniture traveled with them, as did their German furniture-making traditions. Business considerations were among the reasons given both times the Harmonists moved within the United States. Besides being agriculturally self-sufficient, they were economically successful with a number of industries, including the cultivating and making of silk, an industry headed by Rapp’s granddaughter, Gertrude. As the original members aged, the society was replenished with new immigrants from Germany, but in later years they became reluctant to accept new members and depended increasingly on hired labor. As their own industries declined they invested in outside ventures such as the railways, gas, and oil. The society was dissolved in 1905 when there were only three members remaining.

1. Philip D. Zimmerman, Harmony in Wood: Furniture of the Harmony Society (Ambridge, PA: The Friends of Old Economy Village, 2010), 140. 2. Christiana Knoedler, The Harmony Society (Great Barrington, MA: Vantage Press, 1954), 92. Knoedler has the same passage in quotes, but does not attribute the quote. 3. Ibid., 127.

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Harmony Society Feast Hall interior, Old Economy

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Feast Hall Bench

Feast Hall Bench, remade in poplar

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Grotto in the garden, Old Economy

Garden Bench, Harmony Society, photographed in storage in the attic of the Rapp House, Old Economy

Garden Bench

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Society of Separatists OF Zoar 1817 – 18 9 8

Baker’s House Bench Number One House Bench House Bench

many old people and children. With a significant mortgage on their land, and a minority of able-bodied men in the community, it was apparent that many individuals and families would not be able to meet the demands of servicing their debt and survive through the early hard years. A community of goods was proposed, and in 1819 one hundred and four women and fifty-three men signed articles of association. Though Bimeler himself was not a lead proponent of communalism, once adopted he worked to make it succeed. They were, perhaps—at least initially—reluctant communards. These three benches reflect the rigors of their faith and of their early life in Ohio, and the joy they took where those strictures allowed.

Persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the Calvinists in Württemberg, Germany drove the Separatists to escape to religious freedom in the United States. Fines levied in Württemberg for refusal to comply with state laws that conflicted with their beliefs, including refusal of military service, left them barely able to pay their passage. Landing in Pennsylvania, where religious tolerance had been guaranteed by William Penn, they were taken in by the Quakers, who—with funds from their British brethren—helped the Separatists on their way to a new home in eastern Ohio. About three hundred Separatists traveled under the leadership of Joseph Baumeler (his name was later anglicized to Bimeler); there were more women than men, and

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House, built in 1855, which was designed by an outside architect (all houses were numbered rather than named). This special house is thought to have been built for the elders of the community, the care and concern for whom was one reason the Separatists had chosen to embrace communal living in the first place. 2 After the age of sixty, members were offered lighter duties and were given an additional allowance of a loaf of white bread and a bottle of currant wine each week. Many chose to continue with their former work and to remain with their families (marriage and cohabitation were reinstated about 1830, which is also when work on the canal had paid off the mortgage). While the Number One House bench is currently located in the first-floor hallway of the house, it may, of course, not have been built for this house or this location. However, this place in the plain house interior with its tall, quiet rooms, overlooks the lush community garden through the adjacent window, reflecting the mix of austerity and joy in the Separatists’ lives; a combination that finds expression in the design of the bench. The pleasing undulations of the skirt and curving profile of the legs evidence a rhythmic simplicity that is typical of Zoar design and life, and that seems inherent rather than applied to both bench and life. Separatist principles banished all outward ceremonies, such as baptism and marriage; they refused to take a legal oath. They held that a true Christian’s word was inherently true: Marriage, for example, was by simple

In the early years in Ohio they had time for little besides essential tasks. To raise income, members worked on neighboring farms, as well as on their own community agriculture. Women worked alongside men and were vital to the workforce; it was in part to avoid their absence during childbirth that the community adopted celibacy. Couples lived apart in households consisting of between three and fifteen assorted individuals. The first houses were of simple log construction. The early furniture too, like the Baker’s House bench, was quickly made and had no embellishment. The Baker’s House bench is a utilitarian piece that may have been used as a work surface, but could also function as a seat. Nevertheless, it is well made, with the leg brackets dovetailed to the seat; artisans were among the early members of the community. It also reflects the Separatists’ determination to do things right, even in the face of hardship—a determination that had resulted in their expulsion from their German homeland and had brought them to the banks of the Tuscarawas River. It was the river that finally gave them a break. 1 The construction of the Ohio Canal along its banks allowed them to contract for the portion running through their land. With the women sharing the grueling work, the community was able to earn enough to pay off their mortgage and finally begin to relax into relative prosperity. New houses of brick or wood were designed and built by community members. The exception was the Number One

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the community store, baker, and butcher. New members served a probationary year, and signed a contract deeding all their goods to the society in exchange for receiving all they would need. Jacob Sylvan wrote on the subject of admissions policy: “small regard is had for wealth or poverty; much more for integrity and faithfulness. All those who assume membership with sincerity are satisfied with their daily subsistence, clothing, etc., and scorn all other reward save that found in God’s religion.” 3 The community suffered in the cholera epidemic of 1834 and their numbers were depleted. Outside labor was hired in; a practice that continued through to the end of communal living. Indeed, outside influences, coming from tourism more than from hired labor, contributed to the decline of the society. After Bimeler’s death in 1853, their temporal affairs were less well managed: Community surplus was used to buy outside investments rather than improvements in community industries; the outside investments proved unprofitable and the community industries languished, finally leading to the dissolution of the society in 1898. At its height, the society had made and grown almost everything it needed, and was able to sell surplus for income. Zoar furniture, for example, was popular with the outside world, and the cabinet shop in the 1850s and 1860s made furniture for sale. 4 In their benches, as in their lives, they had joined “integrity and faithfulness” with a simple joy in God and his creation. The integration

agreement in front of witnesses. They did not celebrate feast days, barely recognized Christmas, and worked on Sundays when necessary. Everyday, for them, was the Lord’s day and equally joyous. Their enjoyment of the simple pleasures offered by God’s creation found full expression in the community garden, filling a whole village block immediately to the north of the Number One House. The garden is laid out in a pattern of radiating paths and plantings symbolic of Separatist beliefs. The importance of the garden to the community is evidenced by its use in the design of the seal of the Society of Separatists when they legally incorporated in 1832. Joy in nature’s beauty, borne out in the placement of the garden at the heart of the community, was extended throughout the village in the planting of fruit trees along the streets, and the growing of vines on lattices that gave privacy to porches. All members of the community worked. Those without specific skills or assigned duties assembled each day at the trustees’ house from where they were sent to work according to season and need. Three elected trustees managed the society’s business; all adult members voted in annual elections. Throughout the life and lifetime of the society the contribution of women, who formed a majority of adults, was valued and essential. Members lived in households of two or three families, and each household grew its own vegetables and raised poultry; other provisions were dispensed from

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of life and faith can be represented by the bench with a back, which, though used in the home, is of the same design and construction as the longer church benches. 5 The gentle, curving lines of their designs, while graceful, are restrained rather than ebullient. The same was true of other expressions of joy: singing, as noted previously, had its restrictions. Beer, cider, and wine were enjoyed, but dancing, kissing, and sex—other than for procreation—were not countenanced. It was a restrained sort of a joy that they shared.

1. Today the Village of Zoar and its historic buildings are threatened by the river. It is protected by a levee constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which was necessitated by damming further downstream. The levee is now in need of urgent repairs, absent which the village will have to be moved to higher ground, or torn down and the area flooded. 2. Edgar B. Nixon, The Society of Separatists of Zoar, unpublished diss., (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 1933), 63. 3. Ibid., 167. 4. Tricia and Gil Snyder, and Paul Goudy, Zoar Furniture 1817–98: A Preliminary Study (New Philadelphia, OH: Tuscarawas County Historical Society, 1978), 5. 5. Some benches were painted in a small range of colors made from local materials—the famous Zoar blue, for example, was made from woad grown in the garden.

Baker’s House Bench, Zoar

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Number One House Bench, Zoar

Number One House Bench, Zoar, remade in poplar

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House Bench, Zoar. A more common pattern has two wedged-through tenons securing the seat to the end, which it does not overlap front and back.

House Bench, Zoar. The back rail is a replacement of an earlier narrower one; it is nailed on with square cut nails. Additional repairs include slotted screws securing the seat to the end at the front and back.

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Oneida Perfectionists 18 4 8 – 18 81

Big Hall Bench

on three sides and a raised stage on the fourth. Its design and detailing, like that of the mansion House as a whole, is conventional nineteenth century: It speaks of a degree of affluence and comfort, and is, to our eyes, somewhat elaborate. The benches, which were made for the hall, are similarly of a standard design of the time for wooden settees. Compared to benches used by other communities in this book, they are comfortable, with backs and molded seats, and expressive of comfort, including nicely curved armrests at each end, and delicate painted detailing. John Humphrey Noyes, the leader of the Perfectionists, believed that the Second Coming had already occurred and there was no need to wait for heaven: It was

The Perfectionists of Oneida believed they could bring about Jesus’ millennial kingdom themselves, becoming free of sin and perfect in this world. Their aim was to achieve spiritual and behavioral perfection, but they also believed that individual self-perfection was not possible without communalism—the individual’s commitment to the common good. They shared the wealth that heaven, earth, and each other had to offer in a life together that was, paradoxically, the most conventional and most radical of any in this book. The Big Hall is the largest room in the single large brick residence building, known as the Mansion House, at Oneida. It is the physical and social center of the community. The body of the hall is a near square that extends to tiered balconies

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dangerous—pregnancies and shifting the emphasis from male to female pleasure. Relations were for one night only and less in later years, since the successful practice of male continence could result in long and exhausting nights. Exclusive attachments between individual members were forbidden. Older sex partners were also religious role models. The community held that individuals who had progressed further on the path to perfection stood higher in an “advancing fellowship.” In later years, when the successful practice of male continence allowed them to introduce stirpiculture—eugenics by another name—it was those higher in the advancing fellowship who were selected to bear children. However, the prohibition against exclusive love extended to parental love, and children were raised in the south wing from an early age; parental visits were restricted. As for personal relations, so too for material property. The Perfectionists practiced absolute community of property; the only exceptions were the few personal possessions an individual might keep in his or her private room. Members moved rooms periodically, avoiding the danger of attachment to a favorite room. The small, plain private rooms with their simple furnishings symbolized the lesser place of the private sphere at Oneida. In comparison, communal areas were better appointed, their shared furniture richer in design and ornament. This extended to sharing the pleasures of the gardens, where groups gathered on

here already and we have only to reach for it. His followers were not required to eschew the pleasures of this world: Perfection was to be found in refinement of the soul, not mortification of the flesh. Life at Oneida was, in a number of respects, one of conventional middleclass comfort. Visitors remarked on the good food served and the sobriety of the men’s clothing. The Big Hall was used for orchestral concerts and theatrical performances; dances were held, for which the benches were moved to the side. In other respects the community at Oneida was the most unconventional of all successful nineteenth-century communal societies. Noyes believed in the spirit of the Bible, not in the letter of its law. He held that the perfect individual should love all equally, as does God, a tenet he developed into a strong admonition against exclusive love. He viewed monogamous marriage as tyrannical and held that it did not occur in heaven: “In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.” 1 He and the community adopted complex marriage, in which all adult members were married to each other. This allowed any man to have sexual relations with any woman and vice versa. Men approached women—at one time by way of a third party—and might be refused. Young adults were encouraged to partner with older, who would act as spiritual as well as physical guides. They learned male continence, thereby freeing women from unwanted—and in those days,

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behavior, the Oneidans were reported to be of good demeanor and to behave with propriety. On their sober benches, gathered in the Big Hall at the symbolic center of the Oneida community, the members of the community sat together, joining in their search for self-perfection and love for all, helping each other through mutual criticism, and discussing communal matters with their community committees and one another.

“fantastic” rustic benches. The making of rustic furniture was one of Oneida’s industries. Better known and more successful were canning and trap manufacture, the latter subsequently evolving into Oneida silverware. At eight o’clock every evening, members gathered on the comfortable benches in the Big Hall. Meetings were informal and there was no set procedure. Besides instruction from Noyes himself or readings from his previous talks, the community discussed issues of temporal concern. These might be raised in reports by committees of the central members, who managed the community by following principles set out by Noyes. It was sitting together on the long benches in the Big Hall that the majority of members had the opportunity to express their views, contributing to the running of their community. It was here, too, that the proceedings of “mutual criticism” were shared. Every member of the community was subject to criticism by a committee or the community as a whole. The goal was to eliminate bad character traits that were disruptive to communal life and disturbed the individual path to perfection. Although it was said to be crushing, members reported appreciating the opportunity to improve themselves. 2 The Perfectionists came to Oneida from conventional Christian backgrounds to live an ideal of perfect love and behavior toward each other in a communal setting where they shared all the Earth and each other had to offer. Despite visitors’ expectations of salacious

1. Matthew 22:30. 2. Mutual criticism is practiced by the contemporary commune of Twin Oaks, though there it is gentler on the individual. They aim to criticize the undesirable behavior while showing support for the person.

Big Hall, Oneida Mansion House. The seat cushions are contemporary, as is the display of photographs in the background.

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o n e i da p e r f e c t i o n i s t s

Big Hall Bench, Oneida Mansion House

Rustic Bench in Oneida Mansion House gardens

Big Hall Bench, Oneida Mansion House

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Community of True Inspiration in Amana 18 5 5 – 19 3 2

Communal Kitchen Bench Church Benches

Benches in Amana were all simple in design and functional in construction. There were very few designs, each being specific to a specific purpose, and repeated through the years and throughout the seven villages of the Amana valley. 1 Other furniture owned by Amana members included pieces that had been brought from Germany, which in some cases are quite rich in both form and surface decoration. While this cultural tradition was one influence on their furniture design, others included American designs they may have seen—in Buffalo, for example—but more significantly, their own religious strictures against ostentation, as well as the restrictions of their self-sufficient life. The simplicity and utilitarian designs of the benches

The Inspirationists believed that God communicated directly through inspired individuals. Christian Metz, a cabinetmaker and one of the inspired, or werkzeuge, led the people of the Community of True Inspiration from Germany to settle in America in the 1840s, first at Ebenezer, near Buffalo, New York, and later in Amana, Iowa. In their communal life in Amana, the Inspirationists gathered up to eleven times a week on the church benches where they heard readings from the Bible and words of inspiration, either directly from a werkzeug, or in readings from their recorded testimonies. Several times a day, sitting on benches in communal kitchen houses, they shared meals together.

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with men and women at separate tables, the sharing of meals was an important symbol of their communal life together. Indeed, as the dissolution of communal living approached in 1932, more members took meals away in baskets to be reheated in the family apartment, signaling a decline of that communal spirit. For women who worked in the kitchens and gardens, the kitchens were also an important site for social life. Churches, like communal kitchen houses, were built to the same design as the dwelling houses, but were longer and always either brick or stone. Meeting rooms were plain with whitewashed walls; both floors and benches were scrubbed regularly. The church benches were of a design that was unique to the Inspirationists. While they vary in length from ten to sixteen feet, with some having four and some six legs, the design is always the same: strong, spare, simple, and easily disassembled for transport. Some of the benches are said to be of New York pine and traveled to Amana from Ebenezer along with their other furniture. Marjorie Albers quotes Barbara Hoenhle as stating that “the church had transported benches all the way from Germany and just reassembled the benches with pegs.” 4 Whichever version of history is correct, it is certainly the case that the benches are assembled with pegs and that the community endured repeated migrations as a result of their beliefs and way of life. The Community of True Inspiration left Germany for the United States to

are perhaps the purest examples of the latter influences, and most closely reflect their chosen communal life away from the materialist mainstream of nineteenthand early twentieth-century America. As with the benches, so with the buildings. Dolores Hayden describes Amana buildings as “replicable,” with a high degree of consistency in design and dimensions.2 There was one basic design represented by the communal dwelling houses, which were typically two story with a central hallway and eight to ten rooms divided into family apartments. The houses were built of locally sourced stone, brick, or wood, the latter “for the most part ...hard lumber on the principal that the best is cheapest,” and which, nevertheless, was unpainted, as it was cheaper to replace from their own forests than to buy paint. 3 The apartments consisted of bedrooms and sitting rooms, but no kitchens or dining rooms; the people gathered for meals at communal kitchen houses. The kitchen houses resembled the dwelling houses, but were larger, often L-shaped, with extensions that housed the kitchens. The dining rooms were on the first floor of the house, with accommodations above. The simple communal kitchen bench shown here is of typical construction, although an alternate foot profile appears on another bench in the same kitchen. The single asymmetrical brace on the center leg demonstrates the attention to practicality over aesthetics. These benches were painted for ease of cleaning. While meals were eaten in silence

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asked of the shepherd “doth he not perform the task allotted to him faithfully and to the utmost of his ability?” The brother could only answer yes, at which he was told to go and do likewise. 5 Elders were appointed by a board of trustees, who were themselves elected. Each village council of elders managed both the spiritual and temporal affairs of the village, including assigning work according to business and seasonal needs. However, men were typically apprenticed to particular trades while women worked in traditional roles. Good craftsmanship was valued, and Amana furniture continues to be made in the Amana Furniture Shop located in buildings that were formerly the calico print mill. Originally each of the seven villages in the valley had its own sawmill and cabinet shops. The Inspirationists valued communalism and sharing over individual profit. That this was an ideal, and not just a practical social structure, is demonstrated by their not having patented inventions: For example, improvements they made in their wool mills were freely adopted by commercial mills throughout the United States. The humility of the craftsman anonymously working to the best of his abilities, seeking satisfaction in benefiting his community rather than in personal acclaim or profit, reflects those same values. The communal discipline of making benches to the same designs without individual embellishment over many generations embodies the same communal spirit with which they gathered on the benches daily and weekly to share food for the body, as well as the soul.

escape religious intolerance (some having already moved within Germany to the relative haven of Ronnenburg). They bought land near Buffalo, New York and it was there, in 1846, that they adopted a formal constitution of communal ownership, setting into New York State law a practice they had begun to a lesser extent in Germany. However, they were obliged to move again when the attraction for some members of the materialism of nearby Buffalo threatened the spiritual life of the community. The church benches, with their ease of disassembly and reassembly, embody in their design the history of the Society of True Inspiration and its search for a place to peacefully live their communal, spiritual life. In communal life they shared all but a few personal effects. On joining the society, members agreed to accept both its religious teachings and secular mandates; they gave all they owned to the community, keeping only those few personal things. They accepted the work allotted to them by the village elders, and in return received food, (sitting on the communal kitchen benches), housing, medical care, and all necessities, along with a personal allowance at the village store. All were treated equally: Bertha Shambaugh relates that a talented brother approached an elder to ask for a larger allowance in recognition of his greater abilities and contribution to the common good. The elder drew his attention to the simple shepherd tending his flock outside the window, and

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1. The repetition of the same design over

2. Dolores Hayden, Seven American

time can be seen in the thirty-two benches

Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian

I surveyed in the Amana Community

Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Church Museum, Homestead. They are

Press, 1976), 251.

all of the same design, except that nine

3. Bertha M.H. Shambaugh, Amana: The

have four legs and are shorter than the

Community of True Inspiration (1908; repr.,

rest, which have six legs. Within these two

Iowa City, IA: Penfield Books, 2010), 95.

groups no two benches are identical in

4. Marjorie K. Albers, The Amana People

measurements, varying in most cases by

and their Furniture (Ames, IA: Iowa State

only a few inches or fractions of an inch,

University Press, 1990), 20.

suggesting the benches were made at

5. Shambaugh, 117.

different times or by different craftsmen, but in each case to the same design. Their pragmatic approach to furniture can also be seen in the reuse of an existing bench, as in the one illustrated on pages 62 and 63 from the Amana Heritage Museum, Amana, which was likely cut down from a church bench that would have had a back.

Stone Communal Dwelling House, Amana

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Communal Kitchen House, Middle Amana

Communal Kitchen Bench, Amana, remade in poplar

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Communal Kitchen Bench, Amana

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Homestead Church

Church Bench, Amana

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C o m m u n i t y o f t r u e i n s p i r at i o n i n a m a n a

Interior of Homestead Church

Church Bench, Amana, detail of pegged assembly

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Bench, Amana Heritage Museum

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Bench, Amana Heritage Museum, remade in poplar ,

Detail showing wedged-turned through tenons, Bench, Amana Heritage Museum

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Hutterites 1 8 7 4 – present in N orth A merica

Dining Bench

part of the road to salvation. This dining bench, on which community members gathered to eat “with gladness and singleness of heart,” symbolizes both their faith, grounded in early Christian Church practices as told in the Acts of the Apostles, and their daily sharing of this life on Earth together. The Hutterites are both the earliest established—and the most successful—contemporary communal society included in this book. Community of goods was first established in 1528 in Moravia by a group of Anabaptists escaping from persecution in Austria. However, they continued to be dogged by persecution and were obliged to move country numerous times, even twice abandoning the community of

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing daily, with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, Praising God, and having favor with all people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved. (Acts 2:44–47)

To be added to the church the believer must share his possessions, distributing them among his fellows according to need—such is the faith of the Hutterites, for whom communal living is an integral

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culture is austere. It may even be visually arid to the eyes of the outsider. Community carpenters build houses and furniture that answer only to basic needs. “Christians shall not apply their industry on outward ornamentation to please the world.” 1 This dining bench, despite the simple rounding of the feet and articulation at the ends of the skirt, cannot be described as elegant. Craftsmanship, which was the main generator of income in the early colonies in Europe, has been replaced in the North American colonies by modern, specialized agriculture. This bench, not elegant but sturdy, does the work the community requires of it. That it retains, perhaps, some vestige of historic German design should not be surprising: German is the language of the community.2 English, required by state education, is considered the language of the “world.” High German is still their sacred language and the practice of German script is maintained. In fact, language is valued over material possessions, and books are the only possessions that may be passed down the generations—or buried in the coffin with a departed member. Even so, it is their content, not their material form, which is valued. Hutterite life and faith are still governed by the teachings of their forefathers almost four hundred years ago. They read sermons handed down in texts from the sixteenth century and forbid contemporary interpretations of the Bible. Their built environment is modeled on Moravian bruderhöfe of the late

goods, before finally embarking from the Ukraine in 1874 to settle in the Dakota Territory of the United States. Regrettably, their trials were not yet over as nationalism and war fever during World War I drove these Germanspeaking pacifists once more from their homes. This last move was across the border to Canada, where they have since thrived, though not always with the willing acquiescence of their neighbors. In the 1920s the Hutterites were able to reoccupy their community property in South Dakota where they continue to this day (the introduction of the legal status of conscientious objector enabled them to remain in the United States through World War II). By 1942 the success of Hutterite colonies in Canada had engendered hostility among neighboring farmers and resulted in legislation in Alberta restricting their ability to freely buy more land. In time, first in Manitoba and later in Alberta, they reached voluntary agreements on limits for expansion. Today there are about 460 colonies, known as bruderhöfe, with some 45,000 members across the North American prairies. That persecution and suffering are the Christian’s lot was told in the Sermon on the Mount, a central text in the Hutterite canon. Unlike many communities described in this book, the Hutterites do not seek to establish heaven on earth. This material life is temporary; it is the everlasting spiritual world that they seek, embracing suffering as necessary to the path. Consequently, their material

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sixteenth century. Rules laid out then rule life today. The subjugation of the material world to the sole, good purpose of attaining spiritual salvation is made manifest in the material world in the strict regimentation of every aspect of life. The rule book specifies to the inch how much cloth a person of a specific age and gender receives for making their clothing, as well as which colors and patterns are acceptable. Buildings are oriented using a compass. Colonies are highly organized: Early Hutterite writers proudly described the bruderhöfe as working like clockwork, or as busy as a beehive, with all working for the common good. However, the aim is not profit, but participation in the disciplined communal Christian life, which is necessary for salvation. Income goes to the colony, not to the individual. Innovations and new technologies are embraced for colony agricultural industries, but personal life remains traditional and plain. Social relations, not material goods, are valued. Time has taught that social relations, particularly group solidarity, are best with colony numbers between 70 and 130. When a colony reaches the higher number it will divide, establishing a daughter colony within visiting distance. Communal life is not optional; it is the only way to live in this material world if one is to attain salvation. The worst offense a Hutterite can commit is to leave the community. The kitchen house at the physical center of the village is where the whole community gathers daily for

sixteenth century’s “golden period.” The houses in those historic bruderhöfe “were acknowledged by contemporaries to be ‘the most beautiful.’ ” 3 Contemporary colony buildings, however, are plain and made of standard contemporary construction materials. Each colony has the same central square as did its Moravian predecessor, with a kitchen house standing at the center or one end of the square and the kindergarten at the other. Around the square, long houses are laid out parallel to each other on a north–south axis; other buildings are parallel or perpendicular to these. Each long house holds four family apartments. The number of rooms in each apartment is dictated by the size of the family and changes as it grows. However, they only sleep and keep their few personal possessions there. The waking day is spent in communal buildings or in the fields. There is no church building: Daily and Sunday services are held in the schoolhouse, where benches for the members are arranged facing those for the council. The strong symbolic connection of church to education underlines the belief that individual human nature is carnal and selfish, and each member must be taught to subjugate that carnal nature in order to receive their spiritual nature in God and the community. Hierarchy is traditional and strict, with men over women and the old over the young. Colony management, both spiritual and temporal, is by an elected hierarchy that was established in the

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meals. While material goods are held to be of no importance, Hutterite praxis, nevertheless, recognizes their potential for symbolic value. At age fifteen a youth is given a chest in which to keep his or her clothes and few personal effects. The sturdy, purposeful dining benches, where they sit together with “singleness of heart,” symbolize the essential central place communalism has in their life and faith.

1. Peter Rideman, “Account of Our Religion, Doctrine and Faith,” quoted in Hutterite Society, ed. John A. Hostetler (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 44. 2. Compare to the Ephrata Cloister and Harmony Society benches, which also have braces on one side, though no skirt on the other. 3. Hostetler, Hutterite Society, 34.

Dining Bench, Hutterites, Alberta, Canada, early twentieth century

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Hutterites

Front and back views of Hutterite Dining Bench remade in poplar

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Rose Valley 1 9 0 1 – 1 9 0 6  1

Hetzel Bench

this bench according to the almost moralistic principles of construction expounded by William Price, but it is a two-seater intended for use in his own home. As for many other communities described here, Philadelphian Quakers had a hand in the early years. In the nineteenth century, they had helped several groups of German Pietists on their way through the city to new lives further west. In this case, William Price and his family were themselves Quakers, whose home became a meeting place for the discussion of art, economics, and social justice. They shared the latenineteenth century enthusiasm for joining the practical with the ideal, and decided to start a creative community. William

The Rose Valley Arts and Crafts Community is the only community in this book that was not communal. Nevertheless it was—like the others— idealist, if not utopian. Founded by the architect William L. Price and a group of like-minded Philadelphians, it was intentionally modeled on the socialist utopia described in William Morris’s News from Nowhere. What it achieved, for a short time at least, was a community of individuals with similar social and artistic aims, and a visual language that was grounded in the idealist philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. They were not, in the words of Price’s niece, “communistic,” nor were the craft workers integrated with the social class of the founding members. 2 Henry Hetzel built

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Valley Association leased space in the mill to craftsmen and conferred its seal (a Tudor rose) on work of sufficient quality (a practice borrowed from medieval guilds by way of Morris). William Price, who was already designing furniture and having it made in Philadelphia, opened the Rose Valley Shops with his architectural partner M. Hawley McLanahan. Many of the craftsmen they hired had been trained in Europe. While Philadelphia had a long tradition of cabinetmaking, the fragmentation of work in mainstream manufacturing led Price—facetiously perhaps—to complain there were nothing but “button pushers” in Philadelphia, men who knew only one part of a manufacturing process. Price maintained that the integrity of work affected the integrity of character of the individual and of society. Ideally, his craftsmen, like Morris’s, would complete whole projects, and though he was the one who designed the furniture, he hoped their creative contribution would develop over time. His ideal was the “artsman,” a person who had been elevated by their work to become both artist and craftsman. The integration of ideology and furniture went beyond the concept of linking the wholeness of the maker to the full completion of the workpiece. Price, who was the father and ideological leader of Rose Valley, required integrity in the design and construction of the work. Where furniture, like the Hetzel bench, was constructed using pierced tenons that were fixed with wedges,

Morris, who was the father of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and an early exponent of socialism, was to be their guide. Price, who had already been involved in the founding of the singletax community at Arden in Delaware, bought eighty acres in Rose Valley outside Philadelphia.3 On the land stood a derelict textile mill and some housing. The Rose Valley Association, a stock company, was formed and shares were sold to Price’s family and friends. In 1901 Price moved with his family to part of the existing millworkers’ houses, which he remodeled with red roof tiles, cream stucco, and ornamental tile work, in emulation of Morris’s description of twenty-first-century postindustrial villages in his utopian News from Nowhere. The first “folk mote,” was held in their living room in December 1901. The term again comes from News from Nowhere, and was the name the citizens of Rose Valley adopted for their community government. After some discussion they decided children over the age of five, as well as women and men, could participate in decision-making. The following year the Price family moved to a larger house, and the millworkers’ houses were converted to a guest house. In 1904 the former bobbin mill was rebuilt as the mote house, which was used for theatrical productions as well as meetings. Morris had described guest and mote houses and a community theater in his utopia. Of the crafts practiced at Rose Valley, furniture making was almost the only successful professional venture. The Rose

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leisure activities, with amateur dramatics, swimming, and tennis. It is notable that such descriptions come with the footnote that craftsmen from the furniture shop were never fully integrated into the community. Many of the integrated members were artists, some taught at art schools in Philadelphia (Henry Hetzel taught mechanical drawing). The Artsman existed only as magazine. In the flesh, artists and craftsmen were separated by class, a condition that was later formalized in the Bauhaus where artists were hired as instructors and craftsmen as technicians. This class distinction continues in most art schools to this day. Unlike the anonymity of makers in most communal societies, we know something of Hetzel. He rented space in the mill at Rose Valley for a metal shop, he wrote an article in The Artsman on simple chair making that illustrates William Price’s thinking on integrity in construction, and he built this bench, along with some other furniture, following those same principles. The furniture, however, was not for others or for the community as a whole; it was for his own use in his home. He lived in the “House of the Democrat,” which was one of a few small cottages built by Price on land adjoining his own larger house. This was considered a democratic move because it reduced the value of Price’s house. Though Hetzel had moved to Rose Valley while the experimental Arts and Crafts community was still in existence, it was soon to end. That came about when the foreman of the furniture shop left and no replacement could be found.

no glue should be used. The design indicated the piece could be disassembled. When other arts and craft designers glued such construction, reducing the pierced tenon to “mere decoration,” Price found it absurd, dishonest, even immoral. 4 In fixed construction, where stopped tenons were held in the mortises with pegs, glue could be applied sparingly. Similarly, while carving of structural members was encouraged, applied decoration was abhorred. In a short paper describing his conversion of an existing barn into a house and studios, Price wrote that the cypress used for the interior was stained “and guilty of no finish other than wax or oil.” 5 The community at Rose Valley looked and played like a community. Their houses, newly built as well as conversions, were “designed to incorporate elements of the regional vernacular, constructed of local materials, and related to other buildings of the village in a way that visually represented a community of shared values and interests.” 6 At Rose Valley, Price was able to design without a rich client in mind. The furniture was a different matter. Like that of Morris and Co. in London, the output of the Rose Valley shops was out of reach of all but the “stinking rich” (Morris). Typically, a piece from Rose Valley cost twice as much as one made by the Stickley shops (which were also priced above their intended market). Shareholders in the association were, necessarily, of a class that had some disposable income. Descriptions of community life at Rose Valley focus on

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1. The Rose Valley Association was

are paid on the value of the unimproved

incorporated in 1901. The Rose Valley

land, improvements are not taxed. Arden,

furniture shop, which started the next

like Rose Valley, was an experiment

year, closed in 1906, which may be said

in alternative government and society.

to mark the ending of the Arts and

It continues today with over 400 residents.

Crafts experiment.

4. 4. William Price, “Some Humors of False

2. Eleanor Price Mather, “The Arts and

Construction,” from The Artsman 1, no. 9

Crafts Community,” in A History of Rose

(June 1904), quoted in Ayres and Ann

Valley, ed. Ham, Mather, Walton and Ward

Barton Brown, A Poor Sort of Heaven A

(Rose Valley, PA: Borough of Rose Valley,

Good Sort of Earth (Chadds Ford, PA:

1973), 13.

Brandywine River Museum, 1983).

3. Price started Arden with the sculptor

5. William Price, quoted by George Thomas

Frank Stephens. Their ideas for the

in “William L. Price and His Goals,” in

community were based not only on those of

A History of Rose Valley, ed. Ham, Mather,

William Morris, but also on the anarchism

Walton, and Ward (Chadds Ford, PA:

of Peter Kropotkin, and the single-tax

Borough of Rose Valley, 1973), 89.

philosophy of Henry George. George held

6. George E. Thomas, William Price:

that people own what they create, but not

Arts and Crafts to Modern Design

what they find in nature. Land in particular

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

belongs to all. Land in Arden cannot

2000), 77.

be owned or sold; it is held on lease. Taxes

Guest House, Rose Valley

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Hetzel Bench

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Detail showing wedged-pierced tenons, Hetzel Bench. Hetzel Bench, with original cushion re-covered—the original cover was green corduroy.

Detail of carving, Hetzel Bench

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Bruderhof (Woodcrest Community) 1 9 5 4 – present in N orth A merica

Bench (factory break room)

and spent long hours in discussions in search of spiritual and social solutions. 1 Eberhard Arnold, a charismatic leader, gathered a small group of Christian seekers in the first Bruderhof on a farm at Sannerz. Publishing and childcare, central to their mission from the first, provided income to supplement their amateur agriculture. Obliged to flee, first from the Nazis in Germany, then from Britain under the threat of internment as enemy aliens, they established communities in Paraguay and Uruguay before settling at Woodcrest in Rifton, New York, in 1954. The community at Woodcrest was sustained from the first by income generated by Community Playthings, a company that makes wood furniture

Bruderhof means “house of brothers.” It is also the German word the Hutterites use for an individual Hutterite community. The two have more in common than they have differences, their histories overlap, and at one time they were united as one church. For both, the education of the young, as well as the community of goods, is central to their life’s work. The design and use of this Bruderhof bench embodies those beliefs. The Bruderhof originated in Germany, where, in the 1920s, many young people, reacting against the bourgeois values that had led to World War I, embraced pacifism and sought a new way of life, particularly one in touch with nature. Of many and varied religious persuasions, they hiked and sang together,

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other questions, each one...must be faced with the decision, again and again, whether or not he is growing into the coming, Christ-determined community...” 2 The reiteration and reinforcement of faith overrides all else in this Christian community. At moments of crisis in Bruderhof history they faced—and overcame through purification—“the danger of putting our communal life before the experience of faith.” 3 Work breaks may also be an opportunity to practice another fundamental Bruderhof principle: Eberhard Arnold’s first law of Sannerz requires members to be open with each other at all times. Disagreements are settled by speaking freely; talking behind another’s back is forbidden. The Bruderhof maintain a mix of church authority and community consensus. Despite their origins with the free-singing, free-seeking pacifists of postwar Germany, Eberhard Arnold, seeing how short-lived the secular communes of the time were, led them into an alliance with the long-standing Hutterites, with whom they shared many beliefs. However, becoming the German Bruderhof of the Hutterites required obedience to strict traditional laws in many things from dress to the banning of musical instruments, which ran contrary to their own origins in the German youth movement. (Singing is also important to the Hutterite, who, however, ban instrumental music.) The tension, or balance, between church authority and open discussion remains part of Bruderhof life:

and toys for children. On their arrival in the United States, the Bruderhof were joined by members of existing American communities, including the majority of the cooperative community Macedonia, who brought the company with them. Product sales soared after the introduction of Head Start in the 1960s, which mandated kindergartens in primary schools. While fabrication of Community Playthings has moved to other Bruderhof sites in the United States, the community at Woodcrest continues its tradition of ethical work practice with Rifton Equipment, a business that designs and manufactures rehabilitation products for adults and children with disabilities. This bench is one of a number of identical benches in the break room in the factory. The design of the benches and their fabrication in maple is influenced by the furniture design and manufacturing techniques of Community Playthings. The design is suited to line assembly from machined parts, rather than to being individually crafted. Child care and education, while not now the direct purpose of this bench, remains in its form a reminder of an important part of the community’s mission. To gather together in a break from work to talk about individual and community purpose is a Bruderhof tradition dating back to their days in Germany. There, on the struggling farm, no one would leave a post-lunch discussion until it had reached its conclusion, pressing worldly tasks notwithstanding. “Efficiency is aimed at in all areas, but above all

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In their lives together the Bruderhof have accepted the task of bearing witness that a life of cooperation and brotherhood is possible in our world. The Sermon on the Mount and the early Christian Church are their guides. Shared principles of ethical work, living together in open cooperation, and teaching, come together in the use and form of this bench.

[T]he Bruderhof is a hierarchical community that is managed according to an authoritarian doctrine, and by a charismatic leadership. The authoritative source of their doctrine is in the belief that they are doing God’s work and this finds expression through the general agreement of the community.... If, at the conclusion of discussion, full agreement has not

1. A Jewish offshoot of the German

been attained, it is continued until consensus is reached.

youth movement later contributed to the

4

establishment of kibbutzim in Israel. 2. Eberhard Arnold, “Foundations,” quoted

The community at Woodcrest gathers in a large circular meeting hall and dining room built on the very top of the hill. Communal family homes stand nearby; the factory buildings lie below in the wooded Hudson River valley. Unlike the Hutterites, the buildings of a Bruderhof community are not laid out to a specific plan; they have often adapted existing buildings and added others as need and geography allow. At meetings in the circular hall, with its expansive view over the treetops, any member may speak. The same was true in the late 1920s where, at their second home in Germany—the Rhonbruderhof— the members “gathered under the big beech tree on the hill overlooking the community. Here...we sought the true inner liberation of the individual from himself, for true peace and a just society.” 5 The circular meeting hall at Woodcrest, overarching the gathered community like that beech tree, is a physical manifestation of the shared seeking that continues today.

in Yaacov Oved, Witness of the Brothers: A History of the Bruderhof (Piscataway, NY: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 32. 3. Dick Domer interviewed in Oved, 216. 4. Oved, 311. 5. The Plough 1, no. 3 (1953).

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bruderhof

Snack Break Room Bench, Bruderhof, Woodcrest Community

Snack Break Room Bench, remade in poplar

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Zhankoye Bench

variant on a traditional form in an example of such “working it out.” As one would expect of a 1960s commune, there is no inherited tradition in the material culture at Twin Oaks, as there was in the nineteenth-century societies of German origin such as Harmony and Zoar. At times, individual woodworkers of skill spent some years in the community and left behind furniture they had made. However, existing skills are not a prerequisite for building at Twin Oaks, where the emphasis is on individual as well as communal growth. Members work for labor credits, one hour of work being valued at one credit, no matter the work. Each member must fulfill a weekly quota, currently set at 45.5 credits per week; credits earned over

Twin Oaks is the only successful (in the sense of long lasting) communal society in this book that is entirely secular and that does not subscribe to a dominant ideology. While the founders set out to make a community structured on the model described in B. F. Skinner’s fictional utopia Walden Two, the community has, in the years following, grown away from that model in a continuing process of “working it out” that does not claim to have reached utopia yet. With the possible exception of Oneida, it is the only community that engages all its members pretty well all the time in an ongoing attempt to fashion the best society they can. This bench, built with inexpensive standard materials and simple technology, fashions a free

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furniture—qualifies for labor credits or should be regarded as leisure activities, is taken by the three planners with input from the whole community. Planners are selected for eighteen-month terms, which cannot be consecutive, and which rotate every six months; new candidates are chosen from volunteers by the existing planners, but can be vetoed by a 20 percent vote of the community. Planners are responsible for long-term policy and make sure they keep themselves informed of community opinion through weekly community meetings, the opinion and ideas board, and private conversation. There is an additional formal mechanism for member input, the annual “tradeoff game,” in which each member weighs in with their opinion on how the next year’s labor and dollar budgets should be allocated. Community priorities change over the years. House manager Kat Kinkade had been able to get used chairs fixed in the wood shop “at an average of an hour’s skilled labor each.” 2 In 2011, my guide, Purl, was unable to get labor credits to do the same. Managers, of whom there are currently about seventy-five, are each responsible for an area such as one of the businesses, the garden, forestry, or vehicle maintenance. Anyone can volunteer to be a manager; they are simply vetted by a committee of managers of like areas. Since a manager in one area will also be a worker in others, any inclination to an abuse of power is naturally curbed. In 2011 Purl managed the bicycle shop and worked in forestry, the sawmill, hay

the quota go to vacation or future leisure time. Individual members state their work preferences, which are then matched as much as possible to community needs. Most members chose to perform a variety of jobs, which avoids the drudgery of routine but can be frustrating for managers of, for example, construction projects, who have to spend time training a rotating roster of willing novices. This bench is located in Zhankoye, the main kitchen and dining hall, which was built under the leadership of a manager who overrode many of the usual processes, causing upset in the community. 1 About half of labor credits are earned for non-income-producing work, including child care and washing dishes. Before the building of Zhankoye, the kitchen and dining rooms had previously been in Llano, the farmhouse original to the property (most buildings in Twin Oaks are named after historical communal societies). This bench is one of four identical ones that had been at Llano, and therefore predate the building of Zhankoye in 1985. The four are currently grouped around a square table that, like most furniture at Twin Oaks, is secondhand from outside sources, rather than built by community members. Discussion concerning the desirable balance between prosperity and workload are ongoing. Most communards joined Twin Oaks to get away from suburban, material ideals and tend to favor time for themselves. The decision about whether the making of a bench— or, indeed, the repair of used

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the correct decision itself; especially since opinions differ even over what the desirable end should be. The lack of due process in the building manager’s decision-making during the building of Zhankoye resulted in the community being reluctant to give that skilled individual responsibility for future projects. The early commune buildings, Llano, the hammock workshop, and three residences, are grouped around a grass courtyard. Each adult, married or not, has their own room. Most are now in the smaller group houses back in the woods, each with its own kitchen and living room. House kitchens are not in continual use and members eat most meals in Zhankoye. Personal possessions are restricted to personal rooms and all other property and income belong to the community. Members get a small, equal cash allowance. The community covers “needs,” not “wants.” 4 Erring members who, for example, fail to meet their labor quota, are subject to mutual criticism in feedback meetings, at which their fellows are careful to express support for the person while criticizing their behavior. The Zhankoye bench was built with standard dimensional pine, probably bought from a local lumberyard and possibly surplus from building construction. The use of such inexpensive, non-furniture-grade lumber for dining benches intended for use when the community gathered daily to eat together, is a sign not just of their refusal of material wealth, but also of the greater importance to them of the immaterial—

and other field crops, and child care. The forestry team sources lumber from their own woodland, supplying the production woodshop with ash for hammock bars, which are passed to the hammock workshop. Hammock making was their first successful income-generating business. It has since been joined by book indexing, tofu making, and seed growing. Working in forestry, Purl has been able to get hardwood for furniture projects he completes on his own time, such as a chair and bench he made for his daughter in the Appalachian green wood tradition. There is a wood shop for personal projects that is separate from the production shop. At the time I visited there were no labor credits allotted for its maintenance and it was something of a shambles, this despite evidence that it had been previously an object of pride. The care taken over the decorative frieze under the eaves was repeated inside the shop in welllabeled—and presumably, at one time, well-organized—storage. 3 This is another example of material culture bearing the marks of community structure. Twin Oaks suffers from and is supported by continuous member turnover. In the early years the average length of stay was six months; now it is four years. While the bylaws are hard—though not impossible—to change, all else is in the hands of the always rotating planners who, though not working in a democratic structure, are subject to continuous feedback from the community. Members regard full community consultation prior to any decision making as more important than making

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of the relationships that go to make up community—over material goods, even of correct process over a correct result. Relationships are between individuals, and it is the continuing negotiation between, and contribution of, individuals that make Twin Oaks. This individual maker was able to accept the rather poor materials allocated to the project, and adapt what is basically a traditional table design to make a pleasing bench. The pegs fixing the tenons in the structure of the legs have been left long in an expression of function that is modernist, but decorative. With care and commitment the maker overcame restricted resources to make four benches for the community that gathers round a table where members meet for meals every day.

1. Kat Kinkade, Is It Utopia Yet? (Louisa County, VA: Twin Oaks Publishing, 1994). 2. Ibid., 227. 3. Since my visit Purl has been able to get his own woodshop near the sawmill. 4. Kinkade, 42.

Exterior of woodshop, Twin Oaks

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Original Zhankoye Bench, Twin Oaks

Zhankoye Bench, Twin Oaks

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Zhankoye Bench, remade in poplar

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Camphill Village Kimberton Hills 1 9 7 2 – present

Kepler Bench Rose Hall Bench

while working things out for themselves, show the influence of Steiner’s teaching. For the community, the benches mark important places in the regular pattern of life. Laid out on 432 acres of rolling Pennsylvania country, the community buildings bring to mind a traditional village. The cluster at the center includes their meetinghouse, the bakery and community cafe, and the workshops and offices. Some homes are close to this center, others farther afield, as are the dairy farm and CSA gardens. 2 Coworkers and adults with special needs live together in homes of four or more adults. One or more householders manage each house, where, if they are parents, they live with their children.

Camphill Village Kimberton Hills is one of over one hundred Camphill Village communities worldwide, of which ten are in the United States. Their mission is to provide communities for people with developmental disabilities. Camphill Village Kimberton Hills sets out to “create a living and working community environment where everyone, especially those with special needs, can discover and develop their full potential.” 1 Though inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, each Camphill Village is independent and makes its own way in consultation with the experience of others. The same is true for the development of the individual, members with special needs, and those without alike. In these benches individual makers,

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special needs receive bed and board, health care, and a small stipend for personal expenses. Coworkers may stay short-term—from one to three years— long-term, or for life. Anthroposophy, the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, is an essentially Christian philosophy that claims the spiritual world can be directly experienced through inner development. Care is taken of the whole being, the spiritual as well as the material; consequently an anthroposophical life is a holistic life. Long before the organic food movement, Steiner had advocated biodynamic farming and it has been practiced at Camphill Villages since the first village was established in Scotland by Karl Koenig in 1940. Lumber for construction is, so far as possible, sourced from windfalls in their woodlands. The wool for the weavery, which is located in Kepler House, comes from their own sheep; it is prepared, hand spun, and dyed with plant dyes, which they grow and gather themselves. The Kepler bench attends the weavers in the entryway to Kepler House. The Kepler bench is an individual creation whose design does not spring from an American or European tradition, but shows the influence of African design mediated through the works of Constantin Brancusi. Steiner, who lectured on the nature of color, painting, and artistic creation, praised the “atavistic clairvoyance” of “primitive man” and his artworks. 3 He was also an autodidact, an amateur in the original sense of the word: a lover of,

Communal meals are important; in addition to breakfast and dinner, all members return for lunch in their own house or as a guest in another. Visiting for meals between houses is a regular and intentional form of community building. Meals are marked with the lighting of candles and words of dedication. Unlike some other communities, benches are not used at meals. This could just be a matter of history—benches are not in common use at tables in homes today—but it could also be that the mix of behavioral characteristics in members of this community render such seating unsuitable. However, homes—and indeed, all buildings—are kept scrupulously clean, and with the regular to-and-fro between work and meals there is a great deal of taking off and putting on of outdoor shoes. Consequently, in Camphill Village Kimberton Hills you will find a bench in every hall and entryway. All adults work. There is work on the farm, in the gardens and orchards, in the bakery and cafe, and in the craft workshops. There is also, of course, work in the home. Adults typically work in more than one area. While a proportion of community income is generated by sales, a larger percentage comes from federal allowances for adults with special needs and from donations from their families. Community structure separates money from work: All community members contribute according to their capabilities and receive sustenance according to their needs. Both coworkers and members with

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meaning one pursuing an interest without formal training. Anthroposophy, which in Greek means the wisdom, or the knowledge, of man, advocates individual development, not a set creed. The maker of the bench did not follow an existing pattern, but was also an amateur in the common meaning of the word. Like the Zhankoye bench at Twin Oaks, this bench is built from standard dimensional white pine, but unlike the maker of that bench, this maker simply screwed the pieces together. (In remaking it I have used joints that trained woodworkers commonly apply to such construction.) The Kepler bench was built by a lover, an amateur without formal training, but one with a clear—perhaps intuitive—design idea. Kepler house is the stone home built from 1939 to 1940 for the family who later donated the property to the community. Besides the weavery it houses the community office and, on the second floor, a household. Many of the thirty or so buildings at Kimberton Hills predate the community, some of which— like Rose Hall, the meetinghouse—were adapted and added to by Camphill architects following anthroposophical principles. Steiner was inspired by the sensuous forms to be found in nature, but did not condone their imitation, proposing instead an inner relationship with nature. The Rose Hall bench stands against a natural stone wall, lit by natural daylight from a skylight above. Like the Kepler bench, it is an individual

creation, which, though not as sensuous in form as the furniture of Wharton Esherick (who read Steiner), shows a gentle curve to the legs and a softening at the seat ends. Anthroposophy is characterized by permeability: art into life, the spiritual into science. The relative thinness of the lumber used—and particularly the divided seat—lightens the whole in a way that makes this bench feel more open to its surroundings than a traditional heavier bench would. The lumber is oak and likely sourced from their own woodlands. Rose Hall is used for weekly meetings and for festival celebrations, which, though mostly Christian, include some that honor the seasons. Repeated ritual—as a way of marking the regular pattern of seasons, weeks, and days— helps to structure a familiar, calm environment for all members, particularly those with special needs. Twice a day every member of the community stands up from a communal meal and leaves one building to go to another to meet for work; twice a day every member leaves their place of work to go to a house for a communal meal. Visiting for meals between households also follows a regular pattern, so that one member will always visit the same house for the same meal on the same day of every week. Such regular interchange builds community ties and helps the transition if a member is asked to change households to meet community needs. These benches, standing in

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hallways where they attend to the constant comings and goings, are an intrinsic part of the calm regularity that patterns life at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

annual fee and receive in return a weekly allotment of produce through the growing season. CSA members thereby share the risks inherent in farming. The farm at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, besides provisioning the Camphill households, earns income through the sale of CSA

1. Camphill Village Kimberton Hills,

shares to the wider neighboring community.

“History and Mission,” http://www.

3. In a 1914 lecture titled “True Aesthetic

camphillkimberton.org/mission.php

Laws of Form” quoted in Dennis Sharp,

2. Community Supported Agriculture

Modern Architecture and Expressionism

provides secure income for local farms

(George Braziller, 1966), 147.

through investment by their local community. CSA members pay an

Rose Hall

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Kepler Bench

Kepler Bench, remade in poplar

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Original Rose Hall Bench in the hallway in Rose Hall

Rose Hall Bench

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i m ag e c r e d i t s

All drawings and photographs by Francis Cape unless

Image Notes

otherwise noted.

p. 32, bottom: Originally published in John G. Shea,

p. 12, top: Arcadia University Gallery

p. 33, top and bottom: Originally published in John G.

The American Shakers and Their Furniture, 1971. p. 12, bottom: Jordan Richards, Arcadia University Gallery p. 24, bottom: Luc Demers

Shea, The American Shakers and Their Furniture, 1971. p. 39, top: Published in Horst Auction House Catalog of

p. 25, top: Luc Demers

Snow Hill Nunnery Sale, August 11, 1997, Lot 4009.

pp. 26–27: Luc Demers

The attribution of the use of this bench to the dining

p. 32, bottom: Luc Demers

room is based on the several descriptions of the use

p. 33: Luc Demers

of benches in the dining room by several sources,

p. 39, bottom: Luc Demers

and the photograph of the “refectory” in Treher, p. 57,

p. 44, bottom: Luc Demers

in which similar benches are drawn up under

p. 50, bottom: Luc Demers p. 55, top right: Oneida Community Mansion House p. 60, bottom: Luc Demers p. 65, top and bottom: Luc Demers

the table. p. 50, top: The skirt is similar to the side rails of the child bed circa 1855, Plate 43 in Zoar Furniture, 1817–1898. p. 69: Published in John Fleming and Michael Rowan,

pp. 70–71: Luc Demers

Folk Furniture of Canada’s Doukhobors, Hutterites,

p. 81, bottom: Luc Demers

Mennonites and Ukrainians, University of Alberta Pub.

p. 87: Luc Demers

Services, 2004.

p. 92, bottom: Luc Demers Research Sources Amana Heritage Society, Amana, Iowa Bruderhof, Woodcrest Community, Rifton, New York Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Kimberton, Pennsylvania Ephrata Cloister, Pennsylvania Museum and Historical Commission, Ephrata, Pennsylvania Old Economy Village, Pennsylvania Museum and Historical Commission, Ambridge, Pennsylvania Oneida Community Mansion House.Amana Heritage Society, Oneida, New York Sabbathday Lake Shaker Museum and Library, New Gloucester, Maine Twin Oaks, Luisa, Virginia Zoar Village State Memorial, Zoar Community Association, Ohio Historical Society, Zoar, Ohio