About this Book In Simple Gifts, June Sprigg tells the story of one of America's last Shaker communities--Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, New Hampshire--during its twilight years, and of its seven remarkable "survivor" women, who were among the last representatives of our longest-lived and best-known communal utopian society. As a college student Sprigg spent a summer among them, and here she gracefully interweaves the narrative of their lives with the broader history of Shakers in America as she shows us how her experiences there affected her own life and opened the door to her creativity.
Gleaning information from old records and journals that she pored over that summer and later, Sprigg brings to life the generations of Canterbury Shakers from the eighteenth century to the present--their customs, their architecture, their spirituality. She also explores the social and cultural forces and the internal imperatives and tensions that caused membership to decrease, all of which, by 1972, brought the community to crisis.
Chronicling the daily life of the village as she found it, Sprigg uncovers the affirming energies of the Shakers--the prominence of mutual love and respect, the devoted tradition of mothering surrogate children, and, above all, the surviving women's spirited eccentricities. She reveals the Shakers as individuals--their personal histories, their wildly different beginnings, what they gave up to join the Shaker community, and, more important, what they gained.
Through her lively text and drawings and her intimate connection with the community, Sprigg brings us close to its people with a book that both enlightens and inspires.
History Knopf | Hardcover | June 1998 $22.00 | 0-679-45504-3
From chapter two of Simple Gifts
Whenever I have thought of my time with the Shakers, one image has always come to mind first and strongest, a single moment that seemed to epitomize the whole of that summer. That image is with me still. In my mind's eye on this dismal, gray Massachusetts day, I am again nineteen, rocking and gently perspiring on a summertime porch in southern New Hampshire half my life ago. I can see us and hear us as if the scene were preserved in the smooth glow of amber. . . . We are four: Sister Lillian Phelps, ninety-six, Eldress Bertha Lindsay, seventy-four, Eldress Gertrude Soule, seventy-seven, and I, comfortably tipping to and fro in our chairs, every forward surge sending a delicate breeze to foreheads and cheeks. It is the end of a summer afternoon and we are all taking a breather before Bertha goes downstairs to start supper. The ladies are talking quietly of this and that. The words aren't clear in my memory, but that doesn't matter so much. What persists is the tone: gentle, serene, at ease. The sound of their voices is like music. Lillian's low chuckles are the bass notes to Bertha's fluty laugh, which sometimes ends in a sigh. Now Eldress Gertrude introduces the fugue in her reedy contralto.
Thirty knotted fingers rest for a while on summery, flowered laps. Ten young fingers fiddle with a loop of frizzy hair. If the sheer goodness in which I feel bathed assumed substance, it would have the honeyed light of a mature afternoon and the faint scent of roses from Bertha's soap. This was Canterbury Shaker Village in 1972. In my memory, this moment lasts all summer long.
Author Biography June Sprigg is a graduate of Lafayette College and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. From 1977 to 1982 and 1986 to 1994 she was Curator of Collections at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She has guest-curated major exhibitions of Shaker design at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo. She is a freelance writer and adjunct instructor of history at Berkshire Community College. Her many publications include By Shaker Hands (1975), Domestick Beings (1984), Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy (1985), and Shaker Built (1994). She lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
May 31, 2001