The round Shaker barn, seen here from the West, is 270 feet in circumference with walls up to 42 inches thick in places. The second level of the original stone section can hold 52 cows all facing the enormous haymow in the center.

he round, stone cow barn five miles West of Pittsfield, Massachusetts has been described as one of the best vernacular farm buildings in America. Built in 1826, it is an architectural masterpiece without an architect. The structure is 90 feet in diameter and can stable a span of horses and 52 cattle. Eight or 10 teams can drive around inside the barn at the same time. The interior support system, of chestnut posts, flowers at the clerestory with fan vaulting of strength, originality, and functional beauty.

Subsequently neglected by the few Shakers remaining in the area, the barn and surrounding village were taken over in 1960 by a local group of Shaker buffs. The buildings have been refitted, the furniture brought back, the gardens reconstructed, and the great barn impeccably restored.

THE SHAKERS

The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, commonly called the Shakers, had its origin in Manchester, England. Ann Lee (1736-1784), a textile worker, joined the sect in 1758, and soon became its accepted leader. Persecuted for their beliefs and practices, "Mother" Ann, with eight Quaker followers, came to America in 1774, settling two years later at Watervliet, near Albany, New York. Aided by numerous religious revivals, effective missionary effort, and the organizing talents of such American born leaders as "Father" Joseph Meachum, Ann's successor, the Shaker movement spread through New York and New England, and later, into Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, until there were nineteen communities in all.

The Shakers believed in separation from the world, celibacy, separation (but equality) of the sexes, confession, and common property (a united inheritance). Each community was divided into family groups, each with its spiritual leaders (elders and eldresses) and temporal leaders (trustees, deacons, and deaconesses). Highest authority was vested in a central ministry residing at New Lebanon, New York (the largest eastern community, fully organized by 1787). Union Village, in southern Ohio, was the "seat of influence" in the west. The Shaker order, a socioeconomic as well as religious institution, stands as the most long-lived and in many respects the most vital and productive of all American communitarian experiments. It survives today in three colonies, at Hancock, Massachusetts, Canterbury, New Hampshire, and Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

THE VILLAGE AT HANCOCK

In 1790 the third of the Shaker communities was founded at Hancock, Massachusetts, just a few miles across the state line from Mount Lebanon. Daniel Goodrich (1765-1835), on whose farm the society was located, was the son of a Baptist deacon and one of twelve brothers, most of whom, with their neighbors, joined the Shaker sect. As one of the earliest communities, Hancock was subject to some of the harshest persecution at the hands of nonbelievers.

Several years after Mother Ann's death, Hancock was "gathered" under the leadership of Calvin Harlow and Sarah Harrison. Several accounts of those early years left by Hancock Shakers describe a life of poverty, deprivation, and ceaseless toil. However, gradually they began to prosper, and with prosperity came the respect and admiration of their neighbors. In time the village acquired 300 members and 3,000 acres of land, and developed a number of industries including the production of seeds, herbs and patent medicines, and the manufacturing of brooms, pails, stoves, and tinware. It was for the latter that the Hancock Shakers were particularly well known, as well as for their famous round barn, according to oral tradition designed by Daniel Goodrich himself.

THE ROUND STONE BARN

From the 1780s, when the Shakers first gathered at Hancock, until 1810, when the community already consisted of five Families numbering more than 145 adults, their farming barely sustained them. The next few years, however, reversed the state of affairs completely. By 1820 we hear of the "bounteous meals" provided for a greatly increased population--nearly 300 adults distributed among the several Families--and of abundant surplus which newfound outside markets were eager to buy. Their agricultural enterprises impressed a traveler in the 1820s as "the finest in the Berkshires, more prosperous now, perhaps, than any others in the county."

This change in prosperity brought with it a rising need for particularized farm buildings; the need for dairy space was the greatest of all. In 1825 one of the Church Family's cattle barns was burned. This disaster spurred the building of what struck contemporaries as a "great curiosity." This of course was the round stone barn.

The barn has remained a curiosity ever since it was built, but unfortunately, there is little surviving documentation concerning its design. From a Hancock journal of 1907, it may be surmised that the designer was the Elder William Deming, who also planned and supervised the building of the nearby Brick Dwelling House in 1830. The journal informs us that outsiders were brought in to supplement the Village workforce, that the masons alone were paid $500 "and boarded," and that the total construction costs came to $10,000--a sum which neighbors pointed to as an outrageous extravagance.

It was certainly an audacious enterprise to be undertaken by what was, even in these successful years of its history, a small farming community. It would be interesting to know what individual or group of individuals conceived it. The essence of its design--a cylinder containing cows radiating around a central mow supplied from above--cannot be claimed as a Shaker invention, for barns on this principle had been built in this country at least since the mid 18th Century. Late in the century, even George Washington owned one. But these were modest, home-farm structures compared to what Hancock's brethren inaugurated, and there appears to be no precedent whatever, either American or European, for the fully developed arrangement they carried through to completion here.

There are two accounts of the barn's original appearance. One is David Dudley's 1829 A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts, which describes the building briefly, but reliably, as it was then:

"It is 270 feet in compass, with walls laid in lime rising 21 feet above the underpinning, and from 3 1/2 to 2 1/2 feet in thickness. The masts and rafters are 53 feet in length and united together at the top. On the lower floor, immediately within the walls, are stables 8 feet high, occupying 12 feet in length with the manger which is inwards, and into which convenient places are left for throwing hay and feed from above. In these stables, which open to and from several yards, a span of horses and 52 horned cattle may be stabled. The covering of the stables forms the barn floor, onto which from an offset there is but one large door way for teams, which make the circuit of the floor and pass out at the same place. Eight or 10 can occupy the floor at the same time; and the hay is thrown into the large area in the center."

This description is elaborated upon in an article published in the Pittsfield Sun from August 14, 1834, entitled "Shakers at Pittsfield, Mass." Describing the barn's interior, it states:

"The roof is a beautiful and curious specimen of carpentry and appears to be most securely supported. In the center of the floor there rises to the apex of the roof a single column, as large as an admiral's mast, round which a hollow frame of slats is fixed, and which serves as a ventilator or chimney, to discharge the steam of hay, open at the top, and protected by a small cupola against the rain. At the same time the hay is raised from the ground floor about a foot by an open floor of slats so that there is, while the hay is new, a constant circulation of air up the chimney--and one of the friends informed me, that the steam passing from the hay in this mode was often so dense that, to use his own expression, you could wash your hands in it."

The Berkshire County Eagle for December 1, 1864 states:

"The large, stone barn of the Shakers, at Hancock, one of the most famous agricultural structures in the country for its size, skillful construction and the completeness of its appointments, took fire about 7 o'clock this morning, from lights carried into it by men at their work, and was destroyed with a large portion of its contents. We are not informed of the loss, which, however, must be large, the building being costly and $3,000 worth of hay also being consumed." A week later another article reported, "It is doubtful whether any considerable portion of the walls, which were of limestone, are fit for rebuilding. The barn was somewhat faulty in structure for its purpose, and should it be deemed advisable to rebuild on so large a scale, doubtless an improved model will be adopted."

The barn's reconstruction brought both change and improvement to the basic structure. First, the earlier, conical roof was replaced with one that was slightly inclined but nearly flat, with only one cupola protruding from its center.

More important than this was the addition of a manure pit beneath the stable and manger area. Like the entry to the wagon level, the manure pit had but one entrance. Manure could be cleaned through trap doors in the stable floor as the vehicle passed below, thus gravity reduced the cowmen's toil.

The last major change in the barn's appearance came in the late 1870s with the addition of the abundantly fenestrated twelve-sided superstructure. This addition improved both the interior ventilation and illumination within and gave the barn its familiar profile.

The labor saving principles of the barn's design were soon grasped by the proponents and publicists of the then-new "scientific agriculture." The barn was referred to as "machinelike in its complete efficiency," and by the 1880s its design was publicized far and wide by the leading farm journals. These invariably informed potential barn-builders that the Hancock prototype was "especially suitable for the large farms, better ordered than most of those we have known before, now opening on the Western prairies." As progressive farmers on the Great Plains were advised, so they built; and during the last two decades of the century timber variants of the Round Stone Barn appeared nearly everywhere along the Western frontier. A number still survive, especially in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, providing to this day the tribute of imitation to what an agricultural writer of the mid-century called "the superb ingenuity of the Shaker builders at Hancock, whose circular barn should forever stand as a model for the soundest American dairying practices."

Find out more about the Shakers.

One story told concerning the barn's design is probably apocryphal: the mechanic of the community, while in the cooper shop one day, mentioned that he was trying to devise a plan by which a new barn could have maximum capacity and, at the same time, be convenient in size and access. At which point the cooper suggested that the mechanic build the barn like one of his tubs.

The barn originally had a conical wooden roof, but after a fire in 1864 it was topped off with a new, 12-sided clerestory and white wooden lantern. As a consequence of the new roof much more daylight enters the barn.

The only visual documentation of the barn's appearance before the fire is this wood-engraving of the "Shaker Village in Hancock" from John Warner Barber's Historical Collections . . . of Every Town in Massachusetts, 1839. It shows the barn's original cupola-topped conical roof (color added).

The interior support system of chestnut posts forms a shaft that is a ventilating device designed to bring fresh air into the hay and to keep it dry and reduce the risk of spontaneous combustion.

Immediately within the circuit walls, on the ground floor, are stables 8 feet high and 12 feet long, with the mangers facing inward, and with holes left for feed to be thrown down from the floor above.

[click on the section drawing above to open a plan of the barn in a separate window]

The ribs that support the roof consist of alternating 3-by-10-inch members and 5-by-10-inch members that have been split about one fifth of the way from the end and are held together by bolts to keep them from splitting any further.

The covering of the stalls forms the main barn floor, onto which one large door opens from an offset entrance. Teams can enter here and, after driving around the 16 foot-wide passageway at the edge of the circle, can leave by the same door. Since they can make an entire circuit unimpeded, the wagons can exit without having to back up or turn around.

Wagons carrying hay from the adjacent fields approach an earthen ramp at the rear of the barn and enter the third level. Once inside they have access to the top of the center feed core, where their loads can be emptied and packed down. Eight or 10 teams can fit inside the barn at the same time.

Other Shaker barns were equally impressive, though none were round. Canterbury, New Hampshire (above) had a barn 200 feet long with polished chestnut beams. New Lebanon, New York had a huge five-story stone barn, 196 by 50 feet. Neither exists today.

All photos
©Roger and Susannah Shepherd