Enfield Shaker Museum Collection

Thanks in part to a grant from the NEH to digitize our collections records, this chart is now available via our online collections database at this link:  1993.3.148 – Church Family Cemetery Chart  The catalog entry has two linked documents available at the bottom of the record; a higher resolution downloadable photo in which each entry is legible, and a pdf listing all the burials and associated information.  The pdf is searchable and the data is exportable if you would like to create a spreadsheet to sort on any of the fields to facilitate data analysis any way that is useful to you.  Used together, the pdf and the image will help you find names quickly, without having to visually search the entire chart.

While an invaluable resource, the origins of this chart are uncertain, so if you like a mystery as much as I do, let’s look at the possible who, what, where, when, and why of this chart’s creation.

To understand “when” it may have been drawn, let’s begin with a little background on the final years of the Enfield community.  The decision to close the community was made around 1918 and the last Enfield Shakers left for Canterbury in 1923.  The remaining land was sold to the La Salette Missionaries in December of 1927, and the last burial in the Shaker cemetery was Sister Fannie Fallon in 1928.

Around this time, with the closure of numerous villages, care of the far-flung cemeteries was becoming overwhelming for the remaining communities.  It was decided in many instances to remove the individual head stones and commemorate the entire cemetery with one large stone marked simply “Shakers.”

The year the individual stones were removed at the Enfield Church Family cemetery is not known for certain, but a letter in the collection of Canterbury Shaker Village narrows down the possible date.  The letter is from Canterbury Elder Arthur Bruce to George McKenzie Roberts, who was compiling land records, burial records, and vital statistics for Enfield, New Hampshire.  Dated October 11, 1933, Elder Bruce states that the individual stones had already been removed, but the new large stone had not been installed.  He also states that, “If you feel to give us time, we can supply the following items connected with each burial—name, date of burial and age at death. We make this proposition, as much record material will have to be searched to make the matter complete.”

The prospect of further correspondence between Elder Bruce and George McKenzie Roberts coming to light is intriguing and could further our understanding of the exact date of the removal of the Enfield stones.

We believe the date of creation of the chart is related to the removal of the cemetery stones primarily because no other record of the layout of the plots is known.  It seems that the creator either had access to documents that are unknown to us today, or they had access to the stones before they were removed.  Our working theory is that the information was gathered, or the chart was begun, while the stones were still standing, possibly to record the location of the burials before or during removal.  That would place the creation of the chart after Fanny Fallon’s burial in 1928 (her entry is in the same hand as the rest of the chart, it does not appear to be added after the fact), but before the date of the 1933 letter which states the stones had been already removed.

One other piece of information that may help us date the chart is that it is drawn on the back of a Goodyear Tire advertising calendar.  We would love to hear from anyone who can help us date this ad which is pictured at the bottom of this post.

Let’s move on to “who” drew it.  The oral history is that the work of removing the stones was done by the La Salettes at the request of the Canterbury Shakers.  Much of the information on the chart was available in the cemetery, such as the order of the burial plots, but other information on the chart was not available in the cemetery or on the stones, so there must have been another source of information.  The few stones from the Church Family cemetery in the museum’s collection contain three pieces of information: name, year of death, and age.  The chart includes that information plus, month and day of death, the Shaker family the deceased belonged to, and in some instances additional information.  (For example James G. Russell’s entry states “Musician” and Moses Johnson’s “Builder of meeting houses”)

It seems most likely that Canterbury provided the additional information, but there is no record of visits or correspondence.  Journals at Canterbury record many trips to Enfield during this time period, including several for business related to the cemetery, but those all referenced fencing, no mentions of removal of the stones are included.  The use of the abbreviation AET – Latin aetatis, of the age – and the fact that the chart remained at Enfield in the possession of the La Salettes may indicate that they created it, possibly answering the “where” question as well.

“What” is a little easier, since we have the chart to examine.  The chart measures 20” x 27”and is drawn in ink on the back of a Goodyear Tire advertising calendar.  The page is laid out into a grid of squares with 10 columns on the left, 11 columns on the right, and a title block in the middle.  Interestingly the columns are numbered right to left on either half.  The entire chart seems to be in the same hand except for the last 4 entries at the lower right.  There are three squares with paper glued over them as to cover mistakes.  The grid cells are numbered in red, which has faded, but is still legible.  The cardinal directions are written along the margins of the chart, but there are no specific landmarks, measurements, or any other indication of scale or actual distances.  The appearance is generally one of an informal work, but the sheer volume of labor involved in recording this amount of data shows that considerable effort and time was spent on this work.

And last we come to “why.”  As mentioned above, it has been our theory that the chart was created to record the locations of the Enfield Church Family cemetery burials as the stones were being removed.  We hope that new information will someday come to light to either substantiate this theory or point us in another direction, but one thing is for certain – we are indebted to whoever took the care and time to create this record of the cemetery and to the La Salettes for preserving and caring for it over the years so that this important resource is available to researchers today.

Enfield’s presentation highlighted an interesting object from the collection, Enfield Brother Nelson Chase’s patented folding stereoscope. Mildly vexed by technical difficulties during the original program, you can now watch a complete version of this presentation on Youtube.

 

The arrival of this shelving is timely, as we will eventually have about 120 boxes of archaeological dig artifacts to organize and shelve.  Artifacts which have been cleaned, cataloged, bagged, and boxed by students at the Plymouth State University archaeology lab are shown organized by dig year and site, awaiting their final home on the new shelving.  Pictured are Lynn and Dick Dabrowski in the process of moving the boxes onto the shelves.

Lynn’s husband, Paul Waehler, works in the attic above, removing post-Shaker boards along the edge of the attic floor.  The attic originally had knee walls, located approximately where Paul’s right hand rests on the floor in the photo, and the original Shaker sub-floor and floor ended just outside the now-missing knee walls.  Interestingly, the area behind the walls was open to the room below.

The table is yellow birch, the most common furniture hardwood at Enfield, and is a remarkable 21’ 6” long.  The top is made of two yellow birch boards each the length of the table, one 15.5 inches wide the other  19.5 inches wide, joined with a spline joint.

The top is supported by a center trestle and three legs with graceful, high arched bases.  Having only three sets of legs over this long span results in a surprisingly delicate, graceful, and ethereal look when viewed from the side.

The table is exhibited in the dining room with place settings that replicate those seen in photographs taken in the 1870’s and 1880’s, supported by information from artifacts of ironstone discovered in several of our archaeological field schools in conjunction with Plymouth State University.

This table was central to daily life of the Enfield Church Family Shakers who dined at it three meals a day for over 8 decades.  Its arrival, along with the ongoing restoration of the dining room, helps us convey the sense of what that daily life looked and felt like in the 19^th Century Shaker village.

( Click here to read an article from our monthly newsletter chronicling this tables 96 year journey from its sale by the Shakers in 1923 to its return to the Dining Room in 2019)

“April 10, 1856, being Fast day, occurred the great fire that swept away about a dozen buildings in all. The fire started in the mill, which stood where the pail shop was afterwards erected, and there being a strong wind from the north the fire was quickly swept through a row of barns, sheds and other buildings, most of them old and not very valuable but three of them were better. It seemed for a time as though it would sweep the entire group. By the most strenuous effort the long wood shed and the Stone house and the front row of buildings were saved. A new mill was erected the same year. This building was afterwards made into a tub and pail factory in 1869, and was used for that purpose til 1892, I think, when the pail machinery, engine, etc., were sold, and about a year later it took fire and burnt down.”

In this postcard image, the North Family buildings that survived the fire are seen in the center left, with the Church Family beyond and even the Second Family in the distance to the right.  The dozen buildings that were lost in the fire would have been to the left (north) of the buildings seen in this photo.

In this view of the lake taken from the hill by Col. Frank C. Churchill in the late 19^th Century, the buildings in the lower right are the buildings that were built to replace the burned ones.  No photographs are known to exist of the North Family before the fire.