A Living Tradition of the Americas

"Put your hands to work and your hearts to God," Ann Lee told her followers, and in that single sentence she gave a religious tradition its entire method. The Shakers — formally the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing — built eighteen communities across the United States, wrote thousands of hymns, produced furniture so perfectly made that it became the standard of American craft design, invented the flat broom and packaged seeds, and maintained continuous celibate community life from 1774 to the present day. At their peak they numbered perhaps six thousand souls in the mid-nineteenth century. Today they are three people in rural Maine. Two hundred and fifty years of continuous practice — of rising at four in the morning, of making everything by hand, of worshipping in ecstatic communal dance, of refusing to bear arms, of welcoming Black members when the country around them was enslaved, of taking in orphans and boarders and anyone willing to sign the Covenant — have left a tradition that is simultaneously near its end and curiously, stubbornly alive.

I. The Founding — Ann Lee and the Manchester Society

The Shakers trace their origin to Manchester, England, in the 1740s, when a woman named Jane Wardley and her husband James Wardley broke from the Society of Friends and established a small dissenting community sometimes called the "Shaking Quakers." The Wardleys had been influenced by the French Prophets — the Camisards, Huguenot refugees who had fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and carried with them a tradition of ecstatic, pneumatic worship: trembling, speaking in tongues, prophesying, communal singing and dancing as forms of direct encounter with the Spirit. The Wardley society was small, persecuted, and intensely charismatic; what it lacked was a theology adequate to the experience.

Ann Lee, born February 29, 1736, on Toad Lane in Manchester, was the daughter of a blacksmith named John Lee. She received no formal education and worked in the textile factories of industrializing England from childhood. She married Abraham Standerin in 1762 and bore four children, all of whom died in infancy. The repeated experience of childbirth and loss focused her already intense religious anxiety on a single question: what was the relationship between physical desire, suffering, and sin? The answer that would define her theology came to her in 1770, while she was imprisoned for disturbing the peace at a Wardley meeting.

In a vision while in prison, Ann Lee received what she described as a direct revelation of the nature of the Fall. Adam and Eve, she understood, had not fallen through pride or disobedience in some abstract sense — they had fallen through sexual intercourse. The body itself, in its generative aspect, was the site of the original sin. From this root all suffering flowed: the children who died, the poverty of industrial England, the violence of the world, the subjugation of women, the corruption of the powerful — all of it traceable to the unredeemed lust that had been the first human act after the creation.

The remedy was equally radical: confession of sins followed by absolute celibacy. Not as a counsel for the specially consecrated, not as a monastic discipline for a clerical caste, but as the universal requirement of genuine Christian life. Ann Lee's teaching was not that celibacy was difficult — it was that the reason traditional Christianity had not demanded it was that traditional Christianity had not yet received the full revelation of Christ's nature.

That full revelation, as Ann Lee understood it, was this: God was dual. God had a male nature and a female nature — Father and Mother, both equally divine, both equally present in the created world. Jesus Christ had been the male manifestation of the Christ-Spirit; but a second manifestation was required, and that manifestation was female. Ann Lee did not initially present herself as this figure; but her followers came to recognize her in that role, as "Mother Ann" — not Jesus's replacement but Jesus's completion, the feminine principle of the divine arriving in the world in the same humble, poor, and outwardly unremarkable form as the carpenter's son from Nazareth.

II. The Theology — Dual God, Female Christ, and the Way of the Cross

Shaker theology is structured around a small number of convictions held with unusual tenacity and consistency across two and a half centuries.

God as dual. The divine nature encompasses both male and female — Father God and Mother God, eternally and necessarily paired. This is not metaphor or accommodation to human experience but a statement about the nature of ultimate reality. The creation of humanity "in the image of God" — male and female — is taken as evidence of this divine duality, since an exclusively male God could not have produced male and female creatures in the divine image. The implications of this theological position were immediately social: if God is equally Father and Mother, then women and men are equally bearers of the divine image, equally capable of spiritual leadership, equally entitled to governance.

Ann Lee as the female Christ. Jesus of Nazareth was understood as the first manifestation of the Christ-Spirit in human form — the male aspect of God's nature taking on flesh, dying, rising, and completing a work of redemption. But the work was not complete. The female aspect of God's nature also required incarnation, and that incarnation was Ann Lee. This is not identical to any classical Christian claim. The Shakers are not asserting that God has a mother alongside God the Father; they are asserting that the Christ — the divine creative principle that took on human form for the salvation of the world — appeared twice: once in male form (Jesus) and once in female form (Ann Lee). The "Second Appearing" in the movement's formal name refers not to a future eschatological event but to what had already happened: Mother Ann was the Second Appearing of Christ.

Celibacy as the way of the cross. The cross that Jesus bore, in Shaker understanding, was not primarily the physical execution but the radical refusal of worldly attachment — and the deepest form of worldly attachment is the generative bond. Celibacy was therefore not a counsel but a necessity: the literal taking-up of the cross of Christ. Ann Lee's teaching that "the cross of Christ" meant celibacy was not original in the history of Christian spirituality (Origen had said something similar, and several monastic traditions operated from similar premises), but she extended it democratically: not for monks only, not for the specially called, but for every serious Christian who wished to live the risen life.

Confession. Entrance into the Shaker community required the public confession of sins to an Elder or Eldress. This was not the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, with its formal absolution from a priestly authority. It was a complete disclosure, before a witness, of the sins of one's previous life — a clearing of the accumulated weight of the past, after which the convert was understood to begin again. The practice was understood as the "door" to regeneration: you could not enter the new life without passing through this threshold.

Communal ownership. The "temporal covenant" required members to give all their property to the community and to receive in return the full support of the community for the remainder of their lives. Property was held collectively, all labor was for the common benefit, and no individual accumulated wealth. This was not poverty in the monastic sense — Shaker communities were often prosperous, because communal labor freed from individual acquisition is extremely efficient. It was an abolition of the economic logic of individual accumulation in favor of collective sufficiency.

Pacifism. Shakers refused to bear arms. They paid war taxes under protest but would not serve in the military. They maintained this position through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and beyond — which made them, at various points, deeply unpopular with the communities around them.

III. The American Communities — Watervliet to Pleasant Hill

In August 1774, Ann Lee and a small group of followers — eight or nine people, including her brother William Lee and her niece Nancy — departed Liverpool for New York. They arrived after a difficult voyage and settled initially in New York City, working for their passage. By 1776 they had established a small community at Niskayuna, near Albany — what would become Watervliet, the oldest continuously inhabited Shaker community.

The revolutionary period was difficult. Shaker refusal to bear arms and the community's English origins made them suspect; Ann Lee and others were briefly imprisoned in 1780 on charges of Loyalist sympathies. Their release was secured partly by the intervention of converts — the community had begun to grow. Between 1781 and 1783, Ann Lee and a small group undertook preaching tours through New England, establishing contacts in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire that would become the nuclei of new communities. Ann Lee died on September 8, 1784, at Watervliet, at forty-eight years old, survived by her brother William and the nucleus of a small but growing movement.

The organizational consolidation of the movement into the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing was accomplished after Ann Lee's death by Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright. Meacham was a Baptist minister from New Lebanon, New York, who had been converted during the 1781 tours; Wright was a gifted administrator and the first woman to hold the highest office in the movement. Together they organized the "gathering order" — the formalization of the communities into the covenant structure that would persist for two centuries. The definitive formulation, adopted at New Lebanon (later called Mount Lebanon) in 1788–1793, established:

• A graded membership system: the Novitiate Order (enquirers and partial members), the Junior Order (those who had signed the Church Covenant but kept some property), and the Senior or Church Order (full members who had given all property to the society)
• Dual leadership at every level: Elder/Eldress (spiritual), Trustee/Deaconess (temporal), with men and women governing their respective domains under coordinated leadership
• Geographic organization: the United Society was divided into bishoprics, with Mount Lebanon, New York, as the head bishopric and seat of the Lead Ministry

At their greatest extent, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Shakers maintained eighteen major communities:

In the northeast: Mount Lebanon NY; Watervliet NY; Hancock MA; Tyringham MA; Harvard MA; Shirley MA; Enfield CT; Canterbury NH; Enfield NH; Alfred ME; Sabbathday Lake (New Gloucester) ME; Groveland NY; Sodus Bay NY.

In the west: Union Village OH; Watervliet OH; Whitewater OH; North Union (Shaker Heights) OH.

In the south: Pleasant Hill KY; South Union KY.

The communities ranged from small (Tyringham closed in 1875 with only a few dozen members) to substantial (Mount Lebanon at its peak had several hundred). The total population of the Shaker communities was approximately six thousand at the mid-nineteenth century peak, though estimates range from four to six thousand depending on how members and affiliates are counted.

The communities were economically self-sufficient and often prosperous. Shaker industries included seed production (the Shakers were the first commercial seed merchants in the United States, producing packaged, labeled garden seeds), medicinal herbs, textile manufacturing, chair-making, broom manufacture, and preserves. The famous "Shaker chair" — lightweight, functional, made to hang on the peg-board rail when the floor needed sweeping — was sold through the Shakers' mail-order catalog, one of the first commercial catalogs in American history.

IV. The Millennial Church — Order, Covenant, and Community Life

The internal life of a Shaker community was governed by the Millennial Laws — a detailed set of regulations that regulated everything from the arrangement of furniture to the proper form of prayer. The Laws were not understood as arbitrary impositions but as the practical expression of a life committed to order, simplicity, and the elimination of distraction. If a room was always arranged in the same way, you did not have to think about where things were. If clothing was always plain, you did not have to think about what to wear. The energy thus freed could go to work and to God.

Celibacy required the strict separation of men and women in sleeping quarters, dining arrangements, and most daily activities. Brothers and sisters worked in different domains: brothers managed fields, workshops, and heavy labor; sisters managed the kitchen, the laundry, the dairy, and textile work. They worshipped together — the Shaker meeting was one of the few places where men and women occupied the same space — but even in worship they stood in separate lines. The famous Shaker "dance" was a communal worship practice, not a social one: men and women moving in parallel rows, not together.

The day began at four or four-thirty in the morning and ended around nine at night. Meals were eaten in silence or with brief devotional readings. Work was understood as worship: "Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as if you might die tomorrow" was attributed to Ann Lee. The quality of Shaker craft work is the material evidence of this theology — not perfectionism for its own sake, but the conviction that careless work is a spiritual failure, that a poorly made chair is a poorly offered prayer.

The community accepted children — both those of converts who joined with families and orphans who were taken in. Children lived in separate households and were educated in Shaker schools. Upon reaching adulthood, they were given the choice to sign the Covenant or to leave. Many left; the Shakers did not pressure them. Those who stayed were understood to have made a genuine adult choice, which was theologically important — coerced celibacy was not celibacy in any meaningful sense.

The Shakers accepted Black members during the antebellum period — a position that made them unusual among white religious communities of their era. Philadelphia and New York had small Shaker families that included Black members. The community at Whitewater, Ohio, accepted freedmen after the Civil War. This was not, for the Shakers, a matter of progressive politics in the modern sense; it was a direct consequence of their theology. If God is both male and female, if Christ appeared in humble form to the poor and marginalized, then the distinctions of race that organized American society had no standing in the Kingdom the Shakers were building.

V. The Era of Manifestations — Gifts of Vision, Song, and Drawing

Between 1837 and approximately 1850, the Shaker communities underwent an extraordinary spiritual revival that they called the Era of Manifestations or "Mother Ann's Work." It began in August 1837 at Watervliet, New York, when a group of young girls fell into trances and began receiving communications from departed spirits. The phenomenon spread rapidly to all Shaker communities.

The manifestations took many forms: ecstatic physical experiences (trembling, falling, spinning), speaking in tongues, automatic writing, clairvoyance, prophetic utterance, and — most distinctively — the production of sacred visual art. Shakers who received spiritual gifts in the Era of Manifestations sometimes received them in the form of drawings: complex, colorful, delicately penned images of trees, flowers, hearts, birds, crowns, harps, and architectural visions of heavenly places, transmitted by spirits (often the spirit of Mother Ann herself) through the hand of the receiver. These "gift drawings" or "inspiration drawings" are among the most striking examples of American vernacular religious art. Almost all surviving gift drawings — approximately two hundred — were produced by women.

The Era also produced an enormous number of "gift songs" — brief melodies received in the spirit state, transcribed, and added to the Shaker hymnody. Many were in invented languages or fragmented syllables understood as angelic tongues. The most famous Shaker song, "Simple Gifts," was not a gift song in this technical sense — it was composed in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackett Jr. at the Alfred, Maine community — but it emerged from the same culture of inspired singing. Aaron Copland's 1944 adaptation in Appalachian Spring, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, gave the tune its twentieth-century resonance.

The Era of Manifestations was also the period of the "Holy Mounts" — each Shaker community designated a hilltop or elevated ground as a sacred outdoor worship space, named and consecrated, where the community gathered for particularly intense seasonal ceremonies. The holy mounts were later closed to outsiders and their ceremonies became private; they were mostly discontinued by the 1850s as the intensity of the revival faded.

The revival is significant in Shaker history partly as a mark of the tradition's vitality at its mid-century peak, and partly as a record of what the tradition generated when left to its own internal logic. A community committed to direct divine encounter, to the gifts of the Spirit, to the belief that the divine continued to speak through ordinary members — that community, placed in intense communal circumstances and given the time and space for contemplative life, produced visionary art of unexpected beauty.

VI. Hands to Work — The Material Culture of the Shakers

The Shakers are known in the broader American culture primarily for what they made. The Shaker chair, the Shaker oval box, the Shaker peg board, the Shaker barn — these have entered American design language as emblems of functional beauty, the aesthetic of what is needed and nothing more.

The theology behind the aesthetic is explicit. Ann Lee's instruction — "do not make what is not useful; do not neglect to make what is beautiful" — expresses the synthesis that the Shakers achieved across two centuries of craft production. Utility and beauty were not opposed; they were expressions of the same underlying order. A chair that was perfectly suited to its purpose — lightweight, sturdy, easily moved, hung on its peg — was beautiful precisely in its fitness. The elimination of unnecessary ornament was not aesthetic minimalism in the modern sense but theological precision: the divine did not need decoration, and to add decoration was to imply that the object as it stood was insufficient.

The results of this theology, applied by skilled hands across generations, were extraordinary. Shaker furniture — particularly the chairs produced at Mount Lebanon — achieved a structural lightness that was technically ahead of its time. Shaker architecture — the round stone barn at Hancock, Massachusetts, completed 1826, built for maximum efficiency of dairy operation — has been called one of the finest functional buildings in American history. Shaker invention extended to tools and processes: the flat broom (replacing the round broom of earlier periods), the circular saw (though the attribution is disputed), the metal pen nib, the improved clothespin, early seed-sorting machinery.

The Shaker Manifesto, the community's periodical published from 1871 to 1899, included detailed descriptions of community life, theological essays, poetry, and practical advice on everything from agriculture to medicine. The Shakers maintained one of the most advanced medicinal herb operations in the country: Shaker extract of sarsaparilla, rose water, and numerous other preparations were sold nationally through the early twentieth century.

The material culture of the Shakers became a source of scholarly and popular fascination in the twentieth century largely through the work of Edward Deming Andrews and his wife Faith Andrews, who began collecting Shaker objects in the 1920s and produced the first major scholarly studies of Shaker craft and aesthetics. Their work initiated the preservation of Shaker buildings and objects that has made the historic Shaker villages accessible to the public — though most of the communities are now museums rather than living communities.

VII. Simple Gifts — Music and the Shaker Sound

The Shakers produced thousands of hymns and sacred songs across two centuries of communal singing. The tradition did not use instruments — all Shaker music was unaccompanied vocal music, performed in the communal worship meeting — and this constraint produced a distinctive sound: clear, unharmonized melody, texts of unusual directness and brevity, rhythmic in ways suited to the movement of bodies in worship.

The worship meeting was the center of Shaker communal life. At its most formal, in the early decades of the movement's organization, the meeting involved elaborate processional dances: ranks of brothers and sisters moving in synchronized patterns, the whole community in motion together as an act of prayer. The patterns changed over time. In the Era of Manifestations, the dances became more ecstatic and less choreographed. Later in the nineteenth century, as communities declined and fewer members were available, formal dancing gave way to marching, and marching eventually gave way to seated hymn-singing. The body had been the instrument of worship; as the body aged and the community shrank, the form necessarily changed.

The texts of Shaker hymns are remarkable for their clarity. They do not employ the elaborate metaphorical architecture of much Protestant hymnody. They are addressed, often, directly to "Mother" — Mother Ann — or to the divine Parenthood, Father and Mother God. They express the experience of the community: the peace of celibate order, the joy of work well done, the love between members who are brothers and sisters in a literal spiritual sense, the grief of death in a community where every death is noticed, the hope of the Kingdom that is being built.

"Simple Gifts," the most famous of all Shaker songs, is short enough to quote in its entirety in these notes: 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, / 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, / And when we find ourselves in the place just right, / 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight. The theology is compressed but complete: humility as liberation, the proper place as the place of love, simplicity as gift rather than deprivation. Copland heard in it something that spoke to the American experience broadly, which is why it has persisted.

VIII. The Long Goodbye — Celibacy, Modernity, and the Closing Communities

The Shaker decline is often presented as a paradox — a celibate community must convert to grow, and as conversion became harder in the modern world, the community shrank. But this framing, while not wrong, misses something. The Shakers understood celibacy not as a strategic error but as a theological necessity. They were not confused about the demographic consequences. The community that was dwindling in the late nineteenth century was not a community that had forgotten to reproduce; it was a community that had, from the beginning, understood its perpetuation as dependent on the free choice of each new generation of converts.

The specific historical factors in the decline are multiple. After the Civil War, industrialization changed the economic landscape in which Shaker industries operated; Shaker furniture, priced for the labor invested, could not compete with factory-produced goods. The orphan and boarding-child population that had fed new generations of potential converts was regulated by child welfare legislation that made it harder for religious communities to take in children on informal terms. The cultural atmosphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — skeptical, scientific, increasingly secular — produced fewer people willing to commit to permanent communal celibacy.

Communities closed one by one: Tyringham 1875, North Union 1889, Groveland 1892, Sodus Bay 1900, Enfield CT 1917, Harvard 1918, Shirley 1919, Union Village 1912, South Union 1922, Watervliet OH 1910, Whitewater 1916, Pleasant Hill 1910, Enfield NH 1918, Watervliet NY 1938, Hancock 1960, Mount Lebanon 1947, Canterbury 1992. With the death of Sister Ethel Hudson at Canterbury in 1992, the last member of the New Hampshire communities passed.

The closing of each community was not drama but administrative detail: the property was transferred, the remaining members moved to a continuing community, the buildings and their contents were sometimes auctioned, sometimes donated, sometimes preserved. The Shaker villages that are now museums — Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill and the Canterbury Shaker Village — owe their preservation to a combination of historical preservation enthusiasm and, in some cases, to the Shakers' own desire that the buildings not be lost.

The one community that refused to close was Sabbathday Lake, in New Gloucester, Maine.

IX. Sabbathday Lake — The Last Community

The Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, was established in 1783 — one of the earliest American Shaker communities, founded within a decade of Ann Lee's arrival in New York. It operated continuously through the centuries of the movement's rise and fall, maintaining an active membership through periods when other communities were closing around it.

In 1965, the community at Sabbathday Lake accepted new members. The Central Ministry at Canterbury — then the nominal governing body of the remaining Shaker communities — had declared the Covenant closed in 1965, meaning that they believed the time for accepting new members had passed. Sabbathday Lake disagreed. The resulting tension between the two communities is one of the more poignant institutional conflicts in American religious history: Canterbury, holding the nominal authority, declaring the end of the living tradition; Sabbathday Lake, holding the actual continuity of practice, insisting that Ann Lee had said something different. The two communities separated, and when Sister Ethel Hudson of Canterbury died in 1992 as the last Canterbury Shaker, the question became moot. There was only one community left, and it was still accepting members.

As of 2025, Sabbathday Lake has three members: Brother Arnold Hadd, Sister June Carpenter, and Sister April Baxter, who joined the community as a novice in 2025. To become a Shaker at Sabbathday Lake, a person must be single, in good physical and mental health, free of debt and dependents. After living at the village for five years, and with the agreement of the full members, one can be formally accepted. Sister April is in her first year; she will be considered for full membership after five years.

The community maintains approximately 1,800 acres, the eighteenth-century meeting house, the dwelling houses, the workshops, a library with a significant archive of Shaker manuscripts, and an active life of prayer and work that continues to follow the basic pattern of Shaker tradition: communal worship, communal labor, the covenant of shared property and celibate life. The community offers accommodations to visitors, operates a farm, and maintains the Shaker Library — one of the major repositories of primary Shaker documents in the United States.

Whether Sabbathday Lake will continue into another generation depends on Sister April and on whoever else chooses to come. The Shakers themselves express neither despair nor complacency about their situation. They have, after all, been declining for 150 years. The question of whether three is enough, or two is enough, or one is enough, is one they have been answering by continuing — by rising at four in the morning, by working, by worshipping, by welcoming whoever comes.

X. The Shakers and the Aquarian Phenomenon

The Shakers occupy a peculiar position in the history of American religion: they are an eighteenth-century founding, shaped by the Protestant radicalism and charismatic revival culture of industrial England, yet their theology anticipates, with uncanny specificity, the concerns that would become central to the Aquarian age.

The dual-gendered God is the most striking example. Ann Lee's conviction that God was both Father and Mother — and that the exclusively masculine God of traditional Christianity was an incomplete revelation — preceded feminist theology by a century and a half. The Shaker argument was not political but theological: the evidence was in Genesis itself. That the same argument would be reconstructed by feminist theologians in the 1960s and 1970s — entirely independently of any Shaker influence — suggests that it is the kind of conclusion reached by sustained attention to the text, in any era when the question is permitted to be asked.

The Shaker structure of dual leadership — every office filled by both a man and a woman, exercising parallel and equal authority — is, among major religious institutions, still unusual in the twenty-first century. The Shakers achieved it in the 1780s and maintained it for two centuries as a matter of theological necessity, not social accommodation.

The Shaker commitment to racial equality, in antebellum America, was enacted rather than proclaimed — Black members were accepted, ate at the same tables, worshipped in the same meetings. This too is a consequence of the underlying theology: a God who appears in humble form, to the poor and the dismissed, to a blacksmith's daughter in Manchester, cannot be the exclusive property of one race.

The material culture of the Shakers — the furniture, the architecture, the design aesthetic of "right order" that eliminates what is not needed and perfects what is — became one of the defining American influences on twentieth-century design. The Bauhaus and the Shakers arrived at similar conclusions from entirely different starting points: function generates form, and the generated form is beautiful. That this convergence occurred across continents and across traditions suggests that the aesthetic theology of "hands to work" arrived at a truth about the relationship between use and beauty that is not culture-specific.

What the Shakers could not solve is what no Aquarian movement that demands radical personal commitment has been able to solve: scale. A tradition that requires permanent communal celibacy can be maintained by those who freely choose it, but cannot be extended by natural inheritance or scaled by conversion alone. The Shaker world — had it remained at its mid-nineteenth century peak of six thousand members — might have solved different problems than it actually solved. At three members, it has solved only the problem of persistence itself. But persistence, at Sabbathday Lake, is not a small thing. Two hundred and fifty years of unbroken continuity in a tradition of radical simplicity, communal love, and direct encounter with the divine is not nothing. It may, in fact, be the deepest Shaker lesson: that faithful practice at any scale is the same practice, that three people rising at four in the morning to work and worship are doing exactly what six thousand people were doing in 1850, and that the quantity of practitioners does not change the nature of the gift.

Colophon

This ethnographic profile was researched and composed for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions series in March 2026. Sources consulted include Wikipedia articles on the Shakers, Ann Lee, the Era of Manifestations, and Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village; WBUR and Maine Public Radio reporting on the admission of Sister April Baxter in August 2025; The Conversation's article on the Shakers' 250th anniversary in America; the Deseret News feature on the last Shakers; the New Britain Museum of American Art's exhibition notes on Shaker gift drawings; and Britannica's entries on the Shakers and Ann Lee.

Primary texts available in the public domain include: A Summary View of the Millennial Church (Calvin Green and Seth Y. Wells, 1823), available at archive.org; and numerous Shaker hymnals, community records, and periodical volumes. A strong archival candidate for the Good Work Library is the Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee (1816), compiled from the firsthand accounts of original Shaker members and among the closest available primary sources to Ann Lee's own teaching.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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