My Shaker Family

I am very excited about The Testament of Ann Lee, the new film about the Shaker founder, because its sounds like quite the experience and I am descended from a Shaker family. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, because one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the Shakers is their celibacy, but my great great great grandfather James Valentine Calver sold off all his possessions and left his (rather large, I’ve seen it) home in Diss, England and traveled to America with his wife Susan and nine children, Ellen, Maria, Henry, James Jr., Thomas, William, twins Mariah and Jane, and Amelia, to take up residence near the Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York (generally called Mount Lebanon) in 1849. Five of the children were indentured to the Shakers, including my great great grandfather Henry:

SA 881.2         Henry Calver, age 5, indentured by his father James V. Calver to Frederick W. Evans of the New Lebanon Shakers; Henry is to be educated, and to be taught farming or some other suitable occupation; witnessed by George M. Wickersham and Moses Clement, August 28, 1850 (Winterthur Library).

At the end of their indentured terms, most of the Calver children left Mount Lebanon, some immediately, others later. James Sr. and Susan never lived with the Shakers, but nearby. Maria, Mariah (later known as Mary) and Jane (Jenny) all left pretty quickly and married. The boys left in phases, but all eventually wound up in Washington, DC with professional occupations. My great great grandfather became a lawyer (as did his son and grandson), Thomas became a physician and Treasury Department official, and the last to leave, James and William, became a dentist and inventor, respectively, in their forties.  James Valentine Calver, Jr. was a complex man: he seems to have thrived at Mount Lebanon and I wish I had more insight into his decision to leave. He was a teacher, a deacon, an assistant elder and craftsman, and left a material legacy: about a decade ago a wash stand made (and signed, which is unusual) by him fetched a notably high price at auction and the Shaker Museum has a box of toothpick holders (a more sustainable version of today’s interdentals) which were sold in the Shaker shop. He also had a patent for “toothache pellets” and a successful practice in Washington, but apparently failing health and a “nervous condition” drove him to suicide while in winter residence in Florida in 1901.

Postcard of “Group of Shakers in Costume” at Mount Lebanon, n.d. (before 1871), including James Calver (tall man upper left), Winterthur Digital Collections; Box of tooth-pick holders, Shaker Museum Collections.

The suicide of James in the world seems shocking; the earlier drowning of his sister Ellen while among her Shaker community even more so. Two years before James and William left Mount Lebanon, their sister Ellen committed suicide by drowning herself in the community’s pond. In the summer of 1869, this act was covered with sensational headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, primarily because a local Justice of the Peace, rather than the County Coroner, was called in to rule on the cause of death. Ellen was buried but questions lingered, and so in late August there was an exhumation and a Coroner’s inquisition, which in the end confirmed suicide but compelled the Shakers to be quite assertively defensive. Ellen was found to be clinically “pure” but also insane, and several newspapers (particularly those in Great Britian!) opined that all members of spiritualist sects were mad. I was particularly struck by the words of a London Daily Telegraph story, or should I say editorial: we can quite comprehend how the free, open, frank, social spirit of the States should strongly revolt against a system of silence, abstinence, and stern self-suppression, which not merely takes away the faculty of sound and active citizenship, but tempts the individual nature to seek refuge from a joyless existence in the desperate resources of madness.

The reference to “sound and active citizenship” in the Daily Telegraph piece really references with me as I cannot imagine a more sound and active citizen than the Calver family member who remained with the Shakers at Mount Lebanon throughout her life, clearly flourishing in their company: Amelia Calver. She was a devoted teacher and a published author. She kept bees at Mount Lebanon, wrote poetry and songs for her fellow Shakers, and traveled to Washington to visit her brothers. (I believe her mother was living in Washington as well, after the death of her father in the 1860s). Sister Amelia always came back to the Shaker community, throughout her entire life, and seems also to have cultivated both spiritual and “mind culture” there, to use one of her own phrases. I think she found joy there too. For a disciplined woman, she seems very free, at least in comparison to my largely unformed impression of a Shaker. Her book Every-Day Biography, published by a New York City publisher in 1889, was just that: a collection of brief biographies arranged for every day of the year. According to her preface, she was inspired to write it by the infinite variety of sea pebbles she found while walking along the seashore, and when she returned to her “mountain home” it took shape and flight. All sorts of biographies are inside, including those of many women from the past and her own time, illustrating the Shaker emphasis on gender equality. Sister Amelia seems like the “last Shaker” to me: when she came to Mount Lebanon as a small child in 1850 it was flourishing, with hundreds of menbers; when she died in 1929 it was in obvious decline. I think she thrived in her chosen world but would have been capable of transition if need be.

One of Sister Amelia’s teaching certificates from Columbia County and a stereoview of her classroom (she is at upper right), Shaker Museum Collections; the “Shaker Retiring Room” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art features Amelia’s desk, on the left; portrait photograph taken in Washington, DC, 1890-1910, Every-Day Biography (1889), and her autograph, Shaker Museum Collections.