Shaker Devotees Keep the Faith

Willis Henry Auctions, Inc., Harvard, Massachusetts

by Jeanne Schinto

Photos courtesy Willis Henry

Three different dealers bought the half-dozen top lots at Willis Henry's Shaker auction under a tent on the grounds of the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, on Saturday, October 3, 2009. They bought for stock and for clients. Either way, they obviously felt confident, and the sweep was interpreted by some as a sign that the marketplace, at least for Shaker, has started to rise up from its former depths.

John Keith Russell of South Salem, New York, paid $117,000 (including buyer's premium) for a ministry trestle dining table. A New Lebanon, New York, example in cherry, it is just 5'5" long, indicating that it was used by community elders or eldresses. A rarity, it is only the third ministry table known in private hands, and Russell has owned the other two.

Each of the three tables differs slightly in form and origins, Russell said. An example in cherry came from Harvard; another in cherry with a bird's-eye maple base came from Watervliet, New York. Both are published in The Encyclopedia of Shaker Furniture (2003) by Timothy D. Rieman and Jean M. Burks. "But this one is the only one known in a paint, in a color," i.e., its original cranberry red finish. "That's very distinctive."

The condition is "unblemished," Russell said. "All of them, for some reason, have been well taken care of, unaltered, untouched, probably because of their great beauty and continued usability."

In the past the Henrys have eschewed published estimates, but since availing themselves of Internet bidding on Artfact, the presale judgments are mandatory. Previewers could find them on line and also in a typed list displayed in the tent. The table's estimate was the sale's most ambitious, $80,000/120,000. For Russell, it seemed irrelevant.

"If you'd asked me before the sale what it might bring, I would have told you there was no upper cap," he said. "There is no reason why it could not have gone a great deal higher. But on that day, with those people there, that's what I was willing to pay, and no one was willing to pay more." He added, "It was in my estimation a very reasonable price."

Russell also bought a large (6'6" x 5' x 20") double cupboard over drawers that had lost nearly all of its finish. "It was bought with a full restoration in mind," said Russell, who paid $58,500 against expectations of $50,000/80,000. In fact, he brought restorers to see it prior to his purchase.

"The piece was originally stained a chrome yellow with a varnish over that," Russell said. "At least five percent of the surface still has that history, so we have a guide. We'll be working almost entirely with the finish. The structural integrity is one hundred percent. It has not lost height, not been cut or altered. All knobs are in place. The interior color, a light pumpkin, is untouched."

At the preview some people wondered about 11 holes drilled above its two doors. The catalog's hunch was "possibly for ventilation." Russell said, "Those holes were threaded, meant for turned pegs." They will be restored.

Besides the fact that dealers like himself were spending money, Russell noted another indicator of market recovery at this 307-lot sale. "This was a healthy market not just because the good things sold, but because the mid-market pieces went, even in a smaller than normal crowd. I think for people who would like to add to collections or to start one—not only in Shaker but in many forms of Americana—the circumstances of the last two decades, where you just couldn't afford it, is not the case today."

Dealers should celebrate the situation rather than bemoan it, said Russell, who also bought in the middle range. "I bought things that in thirty years of dealing in Shaker and in seven or eight years of collecting before that, I have seen so rarely. And I paid hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars for them."

Doug Hamel of Chichester, New Hampshire, whose bill was $58,500 for another of the star lots, a three-drawer worktable, reiterated much of what Russell said about the market, based on his assessment of the sale. "I was surprised that the auction was way stronger than most of us expected," he said. "But more important, the mid market as well as the top market did very well. Shaker is alive and well."

The Shakers were intensely communal, seeming not to glory in individual achievements, but signed work is not uncommon. Hamel's other big purchase was a New Lebanon seed shop desk, signed twice by Orren Haskins. Made of butternut, pine, and cherry, it came to the sale from an Arizona collection, formed in the East. It was knocked down to Hamel for $43,875.

Hamel also bought a rare bound manuscript of so-called inspired writing from the Shakers' Era of Manifestations. Dating from 1838-40, it contains spirit messages, many from Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784). "It was very important to me that it was complete," said Hamel of the book, for which he paid $22,230. "An awful lot of the manuscripts we see have a lot of great calligraphy for four pages and then they're blank. This one is complete all the way through. It has great visual appeal, including its chrome yellow page edges." The dealer also noted that the penmanship was not merely beautiful but also very readable.

Robert W. Wilkins of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, who attended the sale with his wife and business partner, Suzanne Courcier, (and black cocker spaniel, Pearl) bought the sale's cover lot, a blanket chest in its original bittersweet red finish. The price was $39,780. They also bought a miniature blanket chest for $2106 and seemed almost more thrilled with that than they were with the full-size example.

"It was a real sleeper," said Wilkins of the little (3¼" x 6" x 2½") charmer that could easily be held between one's thumb and forefinger. "We were prepared to pay well into five figures for it and were astounded that we were able to steal it. The piece is almost unique in our experience"—they have owned just one other—"and we've been buying and selling Shaker for thirty-five years."

The Henrys did not note in the catalog where they thought the miniature had been made, but Wilkins and Courcier believe it is a product of Canterbury, New Hampshire. The one they used to own, a one-drawer mini, was from there and had the same bittersweet on the outside and the same chrome yellow inside. "It is very unusual for anything Shaker to be painted by Shakers on the inside," Wilkins said.

It's also unusual for Shakers to make toys. "And there's no other way to describe this," said Wilkins, who explained that Shakers didn't think of childhood in terms of playthings. There was a wooden spinning top in the sale, but generally, Shaker-made gifts to children were supposed to inspire rather than entertain. "This was made lovingly and given for joy and for pleasure to some very special child."

Two factors may have held the miniature's price down, in Wilkins's opinion. One was the weather. During the preview on the afternoon before the sale skies were a gloomy gray; some previewers were using flashlights to look at objects in the dim light. Willis Henry said he would never have another outdoor auction again, while his wife, Karel, was saying never to say never. On the day of the sale, a chilly rain fell, sometimes heavily, on this spot of land about 30 miles west of Boston.

"Suzanne and I had the benefit of seeing the piece in bright sunlight at Will and Karel's in Pembroke [Massachusetts] well in advance of the sale," said Wilkins. "We experienced it in all of its glory. There's nothing like light to give you the full benefit of what you're looking at and to enable you to make a clear determination of what it is you're planning to buy. The color on that piece is exquisite. And it didn't translate well in photos. It's a difficult piece to grasp until you have it in your hands."

The other factor that may have worked in their favor was the miniature chest's placement in the sale. Many bidders habitually wait for bargains at the end of a long day, but those same bidders know the first few lots of an auction are just as likely to go under the money. This piece was lot number three. "People really hadn't settled into their seats yet," said Wilkins, adding that, of course, auctions are unpredictable, and no one knows for sure why things happen as they do.

Wilkins did, however, venture an analysis of why middle-range items are starting to move. "Pieces of American furniture in general are bringing prices we haven't seen in thirty-five years," he said. "So for people who love antiques and are patient and diligent and don't have to have the crème de la crème—of which there's not a lot out there right now, because of the market's constrictions—there are opportunities to be had at auctions and from dealers. We're all adjusting our sights. This climate won't last forever, and smart people are paying attention and availing themselves of bargains."

One smart couple was clearly in evidence. Using bidder card 33, they did not make a splash by buying top lots or even underbidding them. Instead they bought at least a dozen pieces at the low end, only one of which was over $3000. Some of those purchases were a desk box, $819; an apple basket, $643.50; an armchair, $643.50; a dressing chair, $468; a side chair and stool, $760.50; two bootjacks, $292.50; a cutlery carrier, $585; a yarn winder, $1170; a side chair, $1404; and a washstand, $1170.

The couple was too busy buying to talk at the sale, but we reached them by phone a few days later. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the husband said that he, his wife, and four children live in the Harvard area in an early 19th-century farmhouse. Not newcomers, they have attended Willis Henry auctions for 15 years. But perhaps they haven't been noticed until now, he speculated, because they haven't bought in such quantity before.

The husband has been an "entrepreneur" since age 16. He and his wife ("a medical professional") are in their early 50's now and have limited time to attend antiques shows but do like "the free market environment" of auctions. "I used to be a coin collector," he continued. "Then I became a professional numismatist. I made a lot of money in the seventies and eighties dealing in rare coins and precious metals. I also did real-estate development. And I find it fascinating to watch the business cycles. It's a cliché but true: the only constant is change. I have no idea whether this is the bottom of this cycle, but [that possibility] was one thing that motivated us [to buy at this auction in quantity]. We'll hang on to these things for five or ten or twenty years, and if past experience is any indication…." He left it at that.

Besides the unnamed collection from Arizona, others were from California and upstate New York. The only named consignors were Charles and Helen Upton, whose Shaker pieces were exhibited, along with those of Faith and Edward Deming Andrews, at the Old Chatham Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New York. The Andrewses famously began collecting Shaker as early as the 1920's; they also published much of the earliest scholarship. Items handled by them have almost as much aura and mystique as those bought directly from Shakers. The Uptons came along later but, like the Andrewses, bought much of their collection from Shakers or from people with close ties to them.

As their devotees well know, Shakers, often mythologized as simple folk, were actually quite the opposite. In need of an economic life in order to support themselves, they were adept not only at developing a wide range of consumer products, they also successfully publicized them through the use of clever advertising, and engaged a network of "Non-Believers" to help distribute them. Unafraid of technology, they always tried to innovate, whether it was an industry (such as individual seed packets) that they invented or one (such as medicines) that they adopted. Then, to put it simply, their celibacy along with cultural change got the better of them. Today only four remain; they live at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community in New Gloucester, Maine.

On the night before the sale, Michael Volmar, curator of the Fruitlands Museum, presented a slide lecture about the Shakers' rise and fall in Harvard. The community was settled about two miles away from Fruitlands. Established there by the 1790's, they thrived for a time with a population that peaked at about 150 in 1850, Volmar said. By 1918, however, they were forced to close, because of dwindling numbers.

By then, Clara Endicott Sears (1863-1960) of Boston had bought Fruitlands to use as her summer estate, having named it after Bronson Alcott's utopian community of Transcendentalists who lived on the same acreage in 1843-44. Lasting seven months, Alcott's group is a reminder that not many utopian experiments work out nearly as well as the Shakers' did.

On the Fruitlands property, Sears reassembled a 1794 building that had served as the Harvard Shakers workshop and office. It is now a Shaker museum, established by Sears in 1922. One can still see the ruins of other Shaker buildings, as well as a Shaker cemetery, on residential South Shaker Road. One can also see, across the valley from Fruitlands, the land on which there used to be a community of Shakers in Shirley, Massachusetts. After the Shirley Shakers left, their buildings were used as an orphanage, then a home for what we used to call juvenile delinquents. Today it is another type of facility—a prison, where security lights blaze harshly at night. Maybe the Shakers wouldn't mind those lights as much as we do. As Doug Hamel noted, "The Shakers were the first ones in Canterbury to have power—their own generating plant."

After Volmar's lecture, dinner was served at Fruitlands, an entire Shaker menu as interpreted by the Cast Iron Kitchen, Maynard, Massachusetts. Among the dishes were Sabbathday Lake stuffed eggs, grilled lamb chops with a mushroom sherry sauce, roasted beets, Shaker acorn squash and potatoes in casserole, and maple sugar sour cream cake for dessert.

Even though these dishes bore little resemblance to those whose recipes are in Sister Frances A. Carr's 1985 cookbook Shaker Your Plate: Of Shaker Cooks and Cooking, there is no doubt about it—the Shakers ate well. Skilled horticulturalists and successful orchardists, they pioneered canning. They even canned meat. Sister Carr wrote about canning poultry in the 1950's, using chickens her community had raised. "There was something very special about the flavor of home preserved chicken. I have never experienced that delicious flavor in any chicken dish since."

At the sale food-related items included an apple core spool and donut cutter that sold in one lot for $702; a covered tin pail, labeled "Shaker's Apple Sauce," that fetched $760.50; and a lot of two rolling pins that was knocked down to collector and M.A.D. contributor Fran Kramer for $819.

Clearly, the Shaker collecting community has an unusually strong sense of camaraderie. It must be the Shakers' influence. We have concentrated here on their objects and the prices they brought at this sale, but it would be a mistake not to remember the Shakers' real reason for being-their spiritual quest.

For more information about the community officially known as United Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, see the Friends of the Shakers Web site (www.maineshakers.com).

For more information about the auction, contact Willis Henry Auctions, based in Marshfield, Massachusetts, at (781) 834-7774 or see the Web site (www.willishenry.com).

Login or Register to post a Comment