The effort to preserve Hancock Shaker Village began shortly after the death in 1957 of Eldress Frances Hall, the leader of the sect’s central ministry and one of the last of that community’s believers. Eldress Emma B. King, a Canterbury, New Hampshire, resident and Hall’s successor, decided in 1959 to close and sell Hancock Village, just as the Shaker leadership had disposed of moribund Shaker villages in the past. In July 1960, a group of preservationists headed by Amy Bess Miller, the wealthy wife of the publisher of the local newspaper, the Berkshire Eagle, bought the village.(15) Miller surrounded herself with an impressive group that included Dorothy Miller, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and wife of seminal folk art scholar Holger Cahill; Professor David Potter, Coe Professor of American History at Yale and former chairman of the university’s American Studies Program; Carl Rollins, director of Yale University Press; and Philip Guyol, director of the New Hampshire Historical Society.(16) Faith and Edward Deming Andrews, who had established themselves as authorities on the Shakers, were also instrumental in the organization.(17)

Miller was able to assemble an august board because the Berkshires had long been a retreat for cosmopolitan sophisticates with an interest in arts and culture.(18) Notable residents included writers Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, sculptor Daniel Chester French, and diplomat Joseph Hodges Choate. Although picturesque, beautiful, and rural, the area is easily accessible from both Boston and New York. Time magazine described Hancock’s supporters as being “made up largely of well-off summer residents of the Berkshires.”(19) The nonprofit organization to preserve the Shaker village established by Miller and her associates complemented others already in the region dedicated to the promotion of classical music, gardening, drama, and sculpture.(20)

Miller, the Andrewses, and the museum’s board were guided in their restoration of Hancock village by a conflation of Shakerism and modern design that the Andrewses and others had cultivated over the preceding four decades. Photographs made in the 1920s and 1930s by William Winter of Schenectady, New York, were central to this contrivance. Winter, in turn, was influenced by the contemporary compositions of photographers Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. His black-and-white images followed the dictates of the modernist photographic canon that reveled in the formal qualities of images, particularly flat surfaces, straight lines, shadows, and empty spaces.(21) He frequently arranged furniture in vacant buildings to achieve specific visual affects.(22)

Winter’s manipulated and largely uninhabited images were broadly reproduced and presented to the public in a variety of contexts. A Winter photograph labeled “Shaker Simplicity” appeared as the frontispiece for the December 1934 issue of Antiques Magazine. Another Winter composition was used in 1935 to illustrate an article in the New York Times Magazine celebrating folk art.(23) His images accompanied a 1937 article by Edward Deming Andrews in the Magazine of Art concerning Shaker architecture and were featured in a special 1945 Shaker issue of House & Garden.(24) They were also exhibited to the public at the New York State Museum, the Albany Institute of History & Art, the Berkshire Museum, the Lenox Library, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the Whitney Museum in New York.(25) Most importantly, the Andrewses used 48 of Winter’s black-and-white photographs to illustrate their influential Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect.(26)

Winter’s photographs, like the one reproduced as the sixth plate in Shaker Furniture, portray the Shakers as religiously motivated, aesthetically attuned modernists.(Figure 1) For this image, Winter folded and arranged towels on a Shaker towel rack so that they harmonized with the window panes, the shadows on the wall, and the rectangles formed by the stretchers in the chair legs, as well as by the pegboards and the room’s other architectural elements.(27) The stark black-and-white contrast of the printed image contributes to an aura of restraint and self-denial.

In 1931, Winter photographed the dining room in Hancock’s Church Family Dwelling House.(28)(Figure 2) This view records the space as the residents knew it at the time, with patterned linoleum floor coverings, factory-produced chairs, framed works of art on the walls, a mass-produced stove, and ordinary electrical light fixtures constructed of chain and white glass. Potted plants crowded the windowsills. The mundane, industrial, and institutional aspects of communal existence recorded in this photograph stand in marked contrast to the impression given by the ahistorical image of the ironing room which, ultimately, was an abstracted ideal grounded in Winter’s aesthetics and photographic style rather than in the reality of Shaker daily life.(29)

Winter’s photographs of Shaker architecture and material culture are part of a larger early 20th-century endeavor in the United States to create an art that expressed national identity.(30) Artists as diverse as Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keefe, Marsden Hartley, and Joseph Stella were drawn to this mission to create an artistic modernism distinct from that of Europe. Some patriotic, artistic modernists claimed Shaker craftsmen as their spiritual forbears and presented Shaker objects as proof of a distinctly American modernist aesthetic inheritance that predated the European artistic movements introduced at the 1913 Armory Show. Announcing an exhibition of Shaker furniture held at the Whitney Museum in 1935, Homer Eaton Keyes, the editor of Antiques Magazine wrote, “The exhibition of Shaker furniture . . . should attract wide attention . . . I shall be particularly interested to observe the reactions of the modernistic tribe . . . This furniture comports, in theory at least, with the ideas of sundry contemporary designers.”(31)

Charles Sheeler, Winter’s contemporary, simultaneously crafted an autochthonous American modernism from regional materials including Shaker objects, hooked rugs, antique chairs, and Pennsylvania barns.(32) Sheeler himself commented, “It is interesting to note in some [Shaker] cabinet work the anticipation, by a hundred years or more, of the tendencies of some of our contemporary designers toward economy and what we call the functional in design.”(33) In her influential article, “American Art: A Possible Future,” Constance Rourke, the American cultural critic and Sheeler’s intimate, hailed, “the spare abstract as this appears in many phases of our folk-expression.”(34) Rourke’s description of unornamented, well-crafted items arrayed in harmonious compositions as distinctively American applied equally to the Shaker antiques and architecture that Keyes and the Andrewses promoted and to Sheeler’s paintings and Winter’s photographs.

The skewed modernist aesthetic appreciation of Shaker architecture and material culture upheld by the Andrewses, Winter, and others informed the restoration and interpretation of Hancock Shaker Village. The village administrators, including Edward Deming Andrews who served as its curator, did what they could to reshape the village according to their shared vision of how an ideal Shaker village should look. Linoleum flooring was removed. Framed portraits and lithographs were taken down from the walls. Objects manufactured in the world outside the village were banished from view. Rooms that were to be open to the public were furnished with the finest examples of Shaker craftsmanship available. These changes perpetuated an aesthetically pleasing and artistically gratifying, albeit erroneous, representation of the Shakers.

The Church Family’s brick dwelling house, furnished with objects from the Andrewses’ personal collection, was the first space opened to the public.(35) Sympathetic journalists and connoisseurs of art and architecture from across the country repeated the aesthetic judgments concerning the Shakers that they had heard from curators, commentators, and scholars over the course of the previous 30 years. In describing the Hancock project for the New York Times in 1961, Richard Shanor noted that “[the] Typical Shaker living quarters . . . will show graphically why the clean, simple Shaker look is so admired by modern decorators. Their craftsmen designed with function uppermost, built well and never spoiled their straight-grained maple or pine with unnecessary weight, ornament or finishes.”(36)

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