Lunacy and Dissent Among the Shakers

The events involving insanity and alleged insanity at White Water Shaker Village to be explored in this article can offer new insights into how Shakers dealt with the problems posed by the mentally deranged. This story, which involved a large family named Hobart that arrived at White Water in 1846, is unusually well documented in both Shaker and non-Shaker materials. I propose to use it as a case study to offer tentative answers to such questions as: How did Shakers define insanity? How did they respond when a Believer showed signs of mental derangement? What treatment was deemed appropriate? How did Shaker views about insanity compare to those held by non-Shakers? Finally, in what ways did the Shaker abhorrence of dissent complicate their views about the nature of insanity

The Tribulations of the White Water Shakers: The Child Molestation Trial of 1840

The historian who attempts to reconstruct the events surrounding the Shaker child molestation trial of 1840 faces a daunting task. Much of the relevant primary source material simply has not survived. White Water village lost many of its records in a devastating fire in 1907. As a result, almost no White Water diaries, journals, or other internal records are available to the researcher. Most nineteenth-century Cincinnati court records were similarly lost in courthouse fires. Curiously, most contemporary Cincinnati newspapers neglected to report on the Shaker trial, and only a single copy of the one that did cover it has survived. As a result, although the basic facts of the origins, development, and impact of the 1840 trial can be determined, there remain areas of dispute and uncertainty. Nonetheless, the 1840 Shaker child molestation trial merits close scholarly attention, for such a study can offer insights into a number of issues, including the way Shakers responded in a time of personal crisis, the problems associated with the care of children in Shaker villages, and the range of attitudes toward the Shakers in the antebellum Midwest

The White Water, Ohio, Shaker Community: A Newly Discovered 1877 Visitor’s Account

White Water Village, located about twenty-five miles northwest of Cincinnati, was one of the smaller Shaker societies and was often overlooked by those seeking to learn more about the communal movement that practiced celibacy and held religious services that featured elaborate dance movements. Only three substantial accounts of visits to White Water are known to historians. The article reprinted here by an author identified only as Kim was published in 1881 in the Westliche Blätter, a newspaper that catered to Cincinnati’s large community of German-Americans. The Westliche Blätter was the Sunday addition of a popular daily, the Volksblatt, and was designed to be a version of what was known in Europe at the time as a feuilliton, a section of a newspaper or a separate edition that focused on broad political, social, and cultural topics

Mothers and Daughters at White Water Shaker Village

One of the core beliefs of the Shakers was that only by making a firm commitment to a life of purity and piety as a member of a community of Believers could an individual escape the sinfulness of the world and properly prepare for salvation. This required that individuals sever ties with their natural, biological families and become a member of a new spiritual family, which would offer the love and emotional support that natural family members had formerly provided. It must also have been difficult for some to abide fully and faithfully by the rules designed to break down the bonds of natural families whose members had become Believers. Typically, an effort was made to place husband and wife in different Shaker families and their children in a separate Children’s Order. But in the smaller Shaker societies, such as White Water, which is the focus of this study, this was not always possible, and frequent interaction between natural family members was inevitable. This article focuses on three ways in which the mother-daughter relationship was transformed when one or more family members joined a Shaker society. First, when a mother and one or more daughters became and remained Believers; second, when a mother became a Believer, but her daughter either left White Water or never joined; and third, when a daughter was a Shaker at White Water but her mother had either left the society or had died