Dear Friends, Yesterday our extraordinary Garden Coordinator, Diana Kimball-Anderson, called me to my office window. “We have our first apple!” she exclaimed. I grabbed my smartphone and ran out of the Great Stone Dwelling to snap a photograph. The lawn south of the Great Stone Dwelling was once an apple…
Enfield Shaker Museum is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a $78,610 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities through funding provided by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of March 27, 2020. The grant will support the Museum’s creation of a website portal…
Really, this is a post about signs. (I couldn’t resist the pun.) There are physical signs, like the new building signs now proudly displayed on many of the Museum’s buildings. Earlier this week I spent a lovely evening, before twilight, walking the grounds and taking these images, thinking about the…
Last week, New Hampshirites and others participated in New Hampshire Gives. In five days 14,375 donors gave $3,372,405 to 488 organizations in the Granite State–an amazing demonstration of what individuals together may accomplish. Forty-eight New Hampshire Givers together donated $8,400 to Enfield Shaker Museum. Still others gave directly to the…
Spring Greetings! When it snowed last week, I sighed. Heavily. “It’s May! Would spring ever be here?” I asked aloud as I looked out the window at blooming yellow daffodils. At that moment they seemed to sigh, too, looking downward, shrugging their snow-laden shoulders. Yet the snow quickly disappeared—Mother Nature…
In the very first year of Enfield Shaker Museum’s existence, when then-director Carolyn Smith’s desk was a folding table in the Great Stone Dwelling’s front hall, a young historian walked in to introduce himself. That young historian was Greg Schwarz, and the Museum is all the richer for his friendship…
What we’ve been up to this past week on social media and our website: Having a little fun with memes and mini-museums Exploring stereoviews, including an 1872-73 image of Joseph Joslin standing in the Enfield Shakers’ parsnips field and a jigsaw puzzle of the Great Stone Dwelling’s veranda Preserving “small…
Dear Friends, Of the many duties I have, this is one of the best. THANK YOU! We are grateful that you have enthusiastically volunteered your talents and your energy to Enfield Shaker Museum. Your devotion ensures that the Museum continues and increases its successes in telling the historically and culturally…
Dear Friends, Take a turn around Twitter or Facebook, or catch the news, and you will find evidence of a rapid rise in yeast buying. Raising bread dough is lowering anxiety during our quarantine. Experts tell us that breadmaking offers us a sense of control and accomplishment, even if the…
Dear Friends, The Shakers lived by the three C’s: celibacy, community, and confession. In 1894, Mount Lebanon Shaker Ernest Pick humorously played on these three C’s in his advice published in the Shakers’ newspaper, The Manifesto. Those who attended the “school of life,” he wrote, earned the degree of “C.C.C.”…