Canterbury Shaker Village
288 Shaker Rd
Canterbury, NH
A hilltop village of white clapboard buildings where a Shaker community lived, worshiped, farmed, and invented for more than two hundred years, preserved almost exactly as they left it.
Canterbury Shaker Village is one of the most complete and authentic Shaker sites in the United States. Founded in 1792 on a hilltop north of Concord, it grew into a self-sufficient community of dwelling houses, meeting house, workshops, barns, and mills, home at its peak to some three hundred believers. Because the community endured for more than two centuries and the land was never redeveloped, the village survives with an extraordinary number of original buildings still standing where the Shakers built them.
The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, were a radical Christian sect known for celibacy, communal ownership, the equality of women and men, pacifism, and ecstatic worship that gave them their name. They were also brilliant makers, and Canterbury is a place to encounter both the depth of their faith and the clean, honest beauty of the things they built.
What Guests Love
- Beautifully preserved 18th and 19th century buildings full of Shaker craftsmanship
- The story of a radical religious community that valued equality, celibacy, and work as worship
- The famous Shaker gift for elegant, functional design in furniture and tools
- Peaceful gardens, trails, and mill ponds spread across the hilltop
Worth Knowing
- The village is a nonprofit museum; guided tours add enormously to the visit
- It keeps seasonal hours, so check the schedule before making the drive
- Approach it as a place of living memory, treating the buildings and story with respect
- Allow at least a couple of hours to walk the grounds and tour the interiors
Details
Canterbury, NH
Learn about Canterbury Shaker Village
Who the Shakers were
The Shakers grew from a small group of English believers led by Ann Lee, who brought the movement to America in 1774. They held that God had both male and female aspects, that men and women were spiritual equals, and that true Christian life meant living communally, holding all property in common, and renouncing marriage and private family in favor of the whole community as family.
Because they did not have children of their own, the Shakers grew by conversion and by taking in orphans and others who came to them, some of whom stayed for life and some who left on reaching adulthood. Their worship included the dancing and trembling that outsiders mockingly called shaking, a name the Shakers eventually embraced.
Life on the hilltop
Canterbury was organized to be self-sufficient. The Shakers farmed the surrounding fields, tended orchards and gardens, raised livestock, and ran mills powered by a series of ponds they engineered on the hilltop. They wove cloth, made brooms and boxes, packaged seeds and herbs, and sold their goods to the outside world, where Shaker quality was trusted.
Daily life was ordered by faith. Work itself was a form of worship, expressed in the Shaker saying that one should put hands to work and hearts to God. Men and women lived and worked separately under that discipline, moving through the dwelling houses on separate stairs and doorways, a separation you can still read in the architecture today.
The gift of good design
The Shakers believed that anything worth making was worth making well and without needless ornament, and this conviction produced some of the most admired design in American history. Their ladder-back chairs, oval boxes, built-in cabinetry, and simple tools are prized today for a spare elegance that feels strikingly modern.
They were also inventive. Shaker communities are credited with practical improvements to everyday tools and processes, and the flat broom, the clothespin, and refinements to washing machines and seed packaging are among the innovations associated with them. At Canterbury you can see this ingenuity throughout the workshops and the ponds-and-mills system that powered the village.
From community to museum
As the decades passed, the Shaker population declined, and the last members of the Canterbury community grew elderly in a village that had once bustled with hundreds. Rather than let it be sold and scattered, the community and its supporters arranged for the village to become a nonprofit museum, preserving the buildings, the collections, and the story intact.
Today Canterbury Shaker Village keeps that legacy through tours, craft demonstrations, gardens, and trails across the hilltop. It stands as both a museum of a remarkable American religious experiment and a quiet, beautiful place to walk among buildings shaped entirely by a way of life devoted to simplicity and work.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Canterbury
Concord
About 15 miles, a 20 minute drive
The state capital, with the gold-domed State House, the New Hampshire Historical Society, and the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.
Lake Winnipesaukee
About 30 miles, a 40 minute drive
New Hampshire's largest lake, gateway to the Lakes Region and towns like Meredith and Wolfeboro.