The Shaker community of Enfield is long gone now. The religious enclave existed from 1792 to 1917, the year the bulk of its land was sold to a tobacco syndicate. In the 1920s, the tobacco firm went bankrupt and sold that land to the state of Connecticut. Decades later a state prison was built on a portion of the land once dedicated to celibacy, prayer, pacifism and simple communal living.
But the legacy of the community is alive at the New Britain Museum of American Art, which this summer inaugurated its newest dedicated art space, the 500-square-foot Shaker Gallery, with an exhibit of furniture created by the Enfield Shakers.
“Nobody has ever honored our one Shaker community in Connecticut,” said Stephen Miller, curator of the museum’s Shaker collection and founder, with his wife, of the M. Stephen and Miriam R. Miller Shaker Gallery. “They were one of 18 long-lived Shaker communities scattered from Maine to Kentucky. Each had its own distinctive style of furniture-making.”
Only one of those communities remains, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, where the nation’s three or four remaining Shakers live.
Of the 18 Enfield-made pieces in the show, the spectacular centerpiece is a 9-feet-tall by 8-feet-wide built-in linen cabinet, which has been embedded into the wall as it was in its Enfield home. The butternut-wood piece has 22 drawers and six cupboards. It was built in 1858 by Grove Wright, one of three master Shaker craftsmen at the Enfield community. Miller said the piece was retrived from the Laundry Building in Enfield. “The building it was in was literally falling apart,” said Miller. “It was in real danger of being damaged.”
Several rocking chairs made in Enfield have characteristic Enfield finials and another distinctive feature of Enfield design, which led many to call them “suicide rockers,” Miller said. The front of the curved rocking beams are cut short, at the same point as the front legs of the chair. “If you rock too far forward, the chair could tip and you could fall off,” Miller said.
An 1870 sewing desk is a good example of the Shakers’ emphasis on efficiency. Unlike most desks, which have drawers facing only one way, this walnut-and-poplar work table has drawers coming out of both the front and the righthand side, so two women could work at the same time, facing different directions. That sewing table is seen in a 1907 photo of a room full of Shaker women and girls.
Octagonal tables, work stands and tables, chests of drawers and a drying rack are among the 19th-century pieces, as well as a “trustees desk” that allowed trustees to work side-by-side in their dealings with “the World,” the term used to describe the non-Shaker community. Each Shaker “family” — a political rather than blood distinction, since reproduction was forbidden to Shakers — had its own trustees, both male and female.
With the opening of the gallery, NBMAA becomes the third museum in the country to have a gallery dedicated to Shaker items. The others are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Miller pointed out that those museums’ Shaker galleries have permanent exhibits, and NBMAA is the only one whose exhibits will change. The Enfield exhibit will be up until Nov. 20, 2016, and be followed by exhibits of Shaker textiles and, after that, Shaker woodenwares.
Many of the items on exhibit come from the Millers’ own collection of about 400 Shaker furniture pieces. He said he and his wife “are gifting objects along the way,” with the ultimate goal of donating to NBMAA “all the pieces that work well here.”
Miller, a retired dentist, and his wife have been members of NBMAA for 40 years. He was approached by NBMAA director Douglas Hyland in 2008 to curate a big Shaker exhibit, and then a few years after that to found the Shaker Gallery and curate its exhibits.
The Millers also have a 14,000-piece collection of Shaker ephemera, which they have promised to Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. These include artifacts from the Enfield community’s pioneering business of selling garden seeds in paper packets, and their selling of medicinal herbs.
The Millers’ fascination with the Shakers began about 40 years ago also, during a visit to Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass.
“I knew absolutely nothing about who Shakers are and were. Everything I saw that day was fascinating,” he said. “It was a totally integrated lifestyle. Everything was related to everything else, how they dressed, how they farmed and lived, their architecture, the food they ate, how they worked and died. Everying was part of an organic whole, all based on an overwhelming commitment to a particular lifestyle.”
“THE SHAKERS: FOCUS ON ENFIELD, CONNECTICUT” will be in the Shaker Gallery at New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., until Nov. 20. nbmaa.org.
