Shake It Up

In 1990 Oprah Winfrey paid $200,000 at auction for a simple, three-drawer wooden work counter. The counter was more than 150 years old, although that alone didn't explain the price. It was also an original Shaker piece. Winfrey's love for Shaker furniture is shared by many, says Sharon Duane Koomler, curator of collections at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. "I go to auctions and watch people become passionate about the Shaker look. It's something about having a piece of our perception of what Shaker life was like, that sense of order and peace."

While the number of original Shaker pieces is limited (furniture was made at Shaker communities from the 1790s until 1960), Shaker furniture is the most widely copied style in the world. "It's uniquely American," says Richard Dabrowski, president of Shaker Workshops in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. "You can't go anywhere else in the world and find anything that looks like it."

Furniture-making was not the focus of life for the Shakers themselves, who first came to New York from England in 1774. They were led by "Mother" Ann Lee, a woman who grew up poor and illiterate in Manchester, England, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Mother Ann married young, had four children who died as babies, and, in her despair, turned more and more toward religious life. Her group's method of worship--spontaneous dancing, singing, shouting and speaking in tongues--led them to become known as "Shaking Quakers" and then simply "Shakers."

Mother Ann and the Shakers were jailed for their beliefs in England and fled to the New World. The first Shaker community, of 19 villages, was established at Mount Lebanon, New York, in 1787.

Simplicity Rules

The Shakers began to make furniture in the 1790s. Communities grew as people from local areas converted and came to live in the Shaker villages. Some converts brought furniture with them, but since the Shakers lived communally they needed some pieces for their villages that were bigger than "worldly" furniture, says Timothy D. Rieman, author of The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture (Harry N. Abrams, 1998). The Shakers made long, sturdy workbenches, ceiling-height cupboards and chests with 16 or 18 drawers. The no-frills furniture was constructed simply according to the principles that guided their lives--a belief in order, a lack of ego and a striving for perfection.

Original Shaker furniture breaks down into two categories, pieces the Shakers made and used themselves and the chairs they made at their factory in Mount Lebanon and sold to the world for a profit, says Dabrowski of Shaker Workshops, which makes Shaker reproductions and furniture kits.

The pieces the Shakers made for themselves included long trestle tables for communal eating; built-in and freestanding storage units, including cupboards, chests of drawers and combinations of the two; bookcases; counters; workbenches; sewing desks; small tripod stands; and chairs. Furniture was designed to be functional, meaning there were no coffee tables or pencil-post beds. In addition, the Mount Lebanon community was the only Shaker village to make and market chairs on a large-scale basis to the outside world.

Shaker style is characterized by "simplicity and good detail," says author Timothy Rieman. Some furniture does include details that weren't purely functional, such as legs on a chest of drawers, which weren't really useful but simply made the piece look lighter. Shaker style may best be described as "the absence of things more than the presence of things," Rieman says. Shaker craftsmen used only local woods--maple, cherry, birch, clear pine, walnut, poplar. Mahogany, a tropical wood was considered "too fancy," says Richard Dabrowski. And unlike the rich wood stains of many Shaker reproductions, most Shaker furniture was painted, in reds, blues, greens and yellows.

Real vs. Repro

Identifying a piece of furniture as authentically Shaker--meaning it was made between about 1800 and 1960 by a Shaker craftsman at one of the Shaker communities--can be difficult. Shaker reproductions have become so common and are done so well that it can be hard to tell them from the originals.

A few years ago a small wooden carrier stamped with the date '87 sold at auction for $3,000, believed by the auction house and the buyer to be an original piece dating to 1887. The problem, says curator Sharon Duane Koomler: it had been made in 1987 by a cabinetmaker at the Hancock Shaker village whose work was "so fine that it made the difference between an original and the reproduction very difficult to ascertain."

So how can you tell? While the Shakers' written rules discouraged them from marking anything, many craftsmen did sign or date their pieces. Sometimes details in the craftsmanship point to a particular cabinetmaker even if there's no other identifying mark. Grove Wright, a cabinetmaker at the Hancock Village in the early to mid-1800s , tapered the sides of drawers so they were thicker at the bottom than at the top, making the drawers lighter without compromising their sturdiness. Such a piece is very traceable to Wright or one of his apprentices, says Koomler. And different Shaker villages had different styles of cabinetmaking, even if the basic forms of the pieces stayed the same.

Today thousands of manufacturers make "Shaker" furniture. "I hate the term 'Shaker style' because it is so abused," says Timothy Rieman. "It's gotten to mean that if there's anything simple it's called 'Shaker,' and that just isn't true."

True Shaker furniture is, finally, just furniture, although furniture made in the context of a system of beliefs that valued simplicity, peace and order. As Sister Mildred Barker of the Sabbathday Lake community said in 1974: "I would like to be remembered as one who had pledged myself to the service of God and had fulfilled that pledge as perfectly as I can--not as a piece of furniture."