“This town cannot boast of having escaped religious fanaticism. But few are aware that one of the strangest delusions, attended with almost incredible extravagances, once prevailed here.”
Thus begins a section of New Ipswich’s 1852 town history entitled “Delusions and Superstitions.”
The fanatics of whom the historians wrote were the Shakers, the group that split off from the Quakers in England and came to America in 1774 with “Mother” Ann Lee.
Today we’re as likely to associate Shakers with furniture as with religion, though a handful of observers still practice quietly in Shaker Village in Canterbury. But when several townsfolks – most from the southern part of town – took up the practice in 1784, they apparently caused quite a stir.
After worshipping as Shakers for a year, a group of the men – John Melvin, David Melvin, Jonathan Kinney, Amos Whittemore and Nathaniel Williams – petitioned to have their minister’s tax abated. At first, town officials approved the request, but later reversed that decision.
The Shaker services were held at the home of Amos Whittemore at the foot of Whittemore Hill Road. They were a bit different from the more traditional services held in town and, at least in the sight of the somewhat biased historian who offered this account some 75 years later, rather shocking:
“They could assemble forty or fifty from this and the neighboring towns. Their exercises consisted of furious and long-continued whirling and dances, exceeding in this respect anything in the annals of savage war-dances; they were performed with half naked bodies, and attended with singing, shouting and shrieking which could be heard for miles; and, in short, they resembled drunken bacchanals or raving wild beasts rather than rational beings.”
Some of the New Ipswich Shakers believed in witchcraft and in their own ability to perform miracles:
“Many amusing stories are told, illustrative of the reluctance of the mind to yield to the dictates of reason under such delusions. On one occasion a man had a paralyzed arm, and one of the miracle-workers told him that before the sun rose again, his arm should be well. On the following morning, when the day was considerably advanced, his wife, finding him still in bed, inquired why he did not rise. He replied that it was not time – that the sun was not yet risen. On being assured that he was mistaken, and that it was some hours high, he declared it to be impossible, because his arm was not yet well. On another occasion, one of them visited a relative, and told him that he had been commissioned by the Lord to convert him and Mr. Gibbs and Col. Heald, that very day, and he had then come for that very purpose. To which the relative replied: The Lord knows that Mr. Gibbs has been gone to Boston for a week, and will not be back for a week to come; and how could he send you here, to convert him today. The Shaker replied, if that is the case, I will go home again. Notwithstanding this palpable refutation of his pretensions, he clung none the less to his delusion.”
The Shakers did not last long in New Ipswich. After a year or two, most moved to Harvard, Mass., where a Shaker community had already been established. Amos Whittemore moved there, but after a few years came back penniless and was supported by his son. “His daughter Sarah,” the history reports, “though quite young, was so confidently regarded by him as possessed of supernatural powers, exerted upon his cattle and other subjects, that when she died she was placed in a box of rough boards, and denied the common rites of burial.”
Some 60 years after the Shakers left town, the Millerites arrived. William Miller had prophesied the second coming of Christ for the year 1843. “In 1842 an immense tent was erected on the south road, near the Bedstead Factory, where preaching was kept up for several weeks,” the history states. “At one time it is estimated that as many as five thousand persons were present.”
When the second coming did not come in 1843, most local adherents went back to their earlier religion.
This column originally appeared in the Monadnock Ledger.