Enfield Shaker Museum

The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers, established their Enfield community in the 1790s, one of a number of such villages across the Northeast. Like their fellow believers, they lived communally, held property in common, practiced celibacy, worshiped with the dancing that gave them their name, and treated men and women as spiritual equals.

They chose the lakeside site for both its beauty and its resources, farming the surrounding land, running mills, and producing goods to sell to the outside world. For decades the community thrived, its members ordering their days around the conviction that honest labor was itself a form of worship.

Completed in 1841, the Great Stone Dwelling is the museum's defining structure and one of the most impressive buildings the Shakers ever created anywhere. Built of granite quarried nearby and rising several full stories, it was designed to house dozens of members in the Shakers' characteristic order, with separate stairs and living quarters for the sexes and rooms of remarkable light and proportion.

It was, at the time, the tallest building of its kind in the country north of the cities, a bold statement of permanence and craft from a people usually associated with modesty. That it still stands, and can be entered and explored, makes Enfield a singular place to grasp the ambition behind Shaker simplicity.

As with Shaker communities everywhere, Enfield's membership eventually dwindled, and the Shakers sold the property in the early twentieth century. The site passed through other hands and other uses over the decades, including a period as a Catholic religious community, layers of history that are part of the story the museum tells today.

Now preserved as a nonprofit museum, the village invites visitors to tour its buildings, view its collections of Shaker furniture and craft, walk the lakeside grounds and gardens, and reflect on a community that pursued heaven on earth through order, equality, and beautifully made things.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.