XV. The Valley of God’s Pleasure

There is a terrible temptation to call Cleveland a jumping town and then point to Shaker Heights as proof, but the world might not understand the obscure allusion. Of all Cleveland’s suburbs, Shaker Heights easily is the most famous-and least known.

The modern metropolitan area has more than sixty suburbs, give or take a town here and there. The precise number depends on the radius of the arc that one cares to swivel in marking the outer limits of the metropolitan area.

One urban expert, Noah K. Birnbaum, who swings one of the meanest compasses in the business, projects his arc so far from downtown Cleveland that it even includes the city of Akron, some thirty miles to the south. It is known, naturally, as “Noah’s MC,” and it infuriates the proud people of Akron even to hear it mentioned.

The national image projected by Shaker Heights is one of extreme prosperity and, appropriately enough, utopian living. The irony is that it started out to be a spiritual Utopia and came to be a materialistic paradise; a communistic experiment turned into a capitalistic triumph.

This prosperous state of .Hairs was officially certified by Uncle Sam in the autumn of 1962, when the United States Bureau of the Census released figures indicating that the Cleveland suburb was the wealthiest city in the nation in its own population category-cities of 25,000 population or more.

According to the 1960 census statistics, the median family income in Shaker Heights was $13,933-a nice, round, pleasingly plump median figure. (Median means the middle income. Half of the families in Shaker enjoyed an income higher than the figure quoted. The other half had an income that was lower.)

The average family income in Shaker is more impressive, having been close to $24,000 a year in 1960. The suburb had 10,402 families with a combined annual income of $249,000,000.

The median value of homes in Shaker at the time of the survey was $34,500. The average value was estimated to be around $65,000.

The people who make their home in Shaker Heights are not pleased to have these sordid details raked up again. It isn’t that they are unduly secretive or sensitive, but when the news of the community’s affluence was published in the nation’s newspapers and magazines in 1962, every confidence man in the country grabbed his suitcase and headed for Cleveland on the dead run. The Shaker Heights police have gotten rid of most of them, but everybody dreads any publicity that might bring on another gold rush like ’62.

The simple life plainly is far behind for Shaker, but once there was no simpler life to be found anywhere in the United States.

The Moses Cleaveland party, in plotting the Western Reserve, laid out four townships on the outskirts of Cleveland and named them, respectively, Euclid, East Cleveland, Warrensville, and Newburgh. In 1822, when Cleveland itself was nothing more substantial than a clearing in the wilderness, and packs of gray timber wolves were still snapping at the heels of the pioneers whenever they ventured outside their cabins, a group of religious enthusiasts banded under the unwieldy name of “The United Society of Believers in the Second Appearing of Christ” chose a fourteen-hundred-acre site in the northwest section of Warrensville Township as the place for their utopian community.

They named their retreat North Union, but they knew it also, more poetically, as “The Valley of God’s Pleasure.” It was actually high ground, several hundred feet above the level of Cleveland, some six miles to the southeast, but “valley,” as used in a symbolic sense by the sect, meant a place apart from the material world; a spiritual sanctuary.

The Believers themselves were nicknamed Shakers, logically enough, because they did a lot of shaking in the physical agitations that were a manifest part of their methods of worship.

A Revolutionary War soldier named Jacob Russell, a native of Windsor, Connecticut, had been the first to settle the site. He was sixty-seven years old when he yielded to the lure of the virgin West and purchased a 475-acre farm in WarrensvilIe from the Connecticut Land Company in 1811. He and two of his sons, Elijah and Ralph, walked from their home in Connecticut to the farm near Cleveland in the spring of 1812, planted the fields which they had cleared the previous summer, and built a cabin. They then walked back to Connecticut, bundled up their belongings, rounded up the rest of the family (Jacob had twelve children altogether), and in June walked back to the Ohio farm.

This should settle any lingering questions as to why the colonies’ ragged armies won the Revolutionary War. Jacob Russell was sixty-eight years old when he made the two trips to Ohio by foot, rolling up about eighteen hundred miles on the old shoe leather.

One of the sons, Ralph, became interested in the Shaker movement and late in 1821, after the death of his father, visited a Shaker settlement called Union Village at Lebanon, Ohio.

As he neared home, on his return trip, Ralph had a vision.

“I saw a strong, clear ray of light proceeding from the northwest, in a perfectly straight horizontal line until it reached a spot near my log cabin. Then it arose in a strong erect column and became a beautiful tree.”

When Ralph told his wife and his brothers, Elijah, Elisha, Return, and Rodney, of what he had seen at Union Village and of the marvelous vision that had presented itself to his eyes, they agreed with him that he had received a sign from on high to establish a Shaker colony where the family homestead stood.

The Russell farm became the nucleus of the colony, and thirty-two members of the Russell family became converts to Shakerism. Not permanently, however. Ralph Russell himself later renounced his membership in the sect, as did a majority of his and his brothers’ twenty-three children.

The Shakers were Christian communists who pooled their belongings and other worldly wealth, drew from a common treasury according to their needs, practiced celibacy and pacificism, dressed plainly, shunned most earthly pleasures like smoking and drinking, prayed hard, and worked hard. Life was the trial and death was the victory. Shakerism was a deviation of Quakerism-“Shaking Quakers” was one of the derisive names applied to their members-and their origin is ascribed to a French religious sect called the Camisards.

Good fortune and prosperity attended the North Union colony in its early decades, and many recruits were attracted to the utopian settlement where no person hungered or thirsted and where the elderly were given tender care. It was, like most Shaker colonies, highly productive. Shakers did not depend alone on agriculture; they also were industrialized, and are credited with some forty inventions, including the Hat broom, the common clothespin, and the circular saw.

One field in which the Shakers excelled-and profited-was in the mixture of home medical remedies and tonics. Among their products sold all over the world were skin ointments, porous plasters, lotions, cold creams, liniments and, surprisingly, even a color tint for graying hair. It was called “The Shaker Hair Restorative,” and it carried the explanatory legend: “Gray hair may be honorable, but the natural color is preferable.”

The Shakers were promoters of the use of sarsaparilla as a blood purifier. Corbett’s Shaker Extract of Sarsaparilla, manufactured at the Mount Lebanon colony, was a standard remedy prescribed by doctors all over the United States throughout the last half of the nineteenth century and even into the present century for the treatment of syphilis. Among its ingredients was potassium iodide.

Out of the Shaker experiment came improved breeds of livestock and better seeds, fruit trees, and vines, and some historians say that this sect led the way in the development of the mass production theory in their community workshops.

Nobody would deny that the Shakers were hard-working and their morals were beyond criticism, but the concept of communism, even on such a high level, was repugnant to some of the Shakers’ neighbors. The sect’s drastic departure from the accepted mores of the day, and some of its strange religious practices caused many outsiders to mock them and others to fear them.

One of the most deplorable episodes involving the Cleveland Shaker colony was the time a gang of persecutors mounted on horseback and carrying lighted torches raided the peaceful community and set fire to many of the buildings. The Shakers philosophically turned the other cheek and bent to the task of rebuilding.

Persons practicing more conventional religions found it hard to reconcile the physical frenzies which were a part of Shaker worship with the restrained reverence of more orthodox sects. It wasn’t only the incorporation of dancing into the Shaker worship that astonished and frightened outsiders. There were even more spectacular manifestations of religious enthusiasm which have been catalogued under the names of The Falling, The Jerks, The Dancing, The Barking, and The Singing Exercise.

A student of the Cleveland colony, Caroline B. Piercy, describes the physical agitations in her book, The Valley of God’s Pleasure, as follows:

“The Falling… meant the victims lay apparently lifeless.

“The Jerks… Hard to describe. Sometimes affected only a portion of the body of the victim who was under strong emotional stress; again it would affect the whole body when the victim would jerk backward and forward without any control of himself. This movement often took place so rapidly that the onlooker could not distinguish the features of the face. Sometimes the head almost touched the floor in this manifestation. No one could account for these strange happenings and the curious thing was, that many of these were thrown with terrific violence or jerked by some terrible force and although it was awful to behold, no one ever sustained a bodily injury.

“The Dancing… usually began with the jerks and affected only the professed religionists as ministers and deeply pious laymen. Such dancing was heavenly to behold. There was nothing in it of levity, nor was it calculated to excite levity in the beholders. The saints of heaven shone through the countenances of these dancers. Thus they moved (the motion sometimes was very rapid and again it was very slow) in a set figure until nature seemed exhausted and they would fall prostrate to the floor. Often during these dances solemn praises would arise, or glorious exaltations would come from the lips of the performer.

“The Barking… the barking exercise was similar to the jerks especially when only the head was affected. Strange sounds resembling that of the barking of a dog would be uttered at each jerk. It got its name from an old Presbyterian preacher who had gone to the woods for private devotion and was violently seized with the jerks. Standing near a tall tree, he grasped hold of it to avoid falling as his head jerked back and forth and he uttered the strange barks. Some wag discovered him in this position and reported that he had ‘found the old preacher barking up a tree.’

“The Singing Exercise… was the most unaccountable of all. The subject was always in a happy frame of mind and would sing most melodiously, not from the mouth or through the nose, but entirely from the chest- the sound issuing forth like from an organ. Such music silenced everyone and attracted the attention of all. It was actually heavenly and indescribable. None could ever tire of hearing of it.”

The Shaker colony in Cleveland, which had reached a peak population of three hundred believers at one time, steadily declined after the Civil War until by 1888 there were only twenty-seven remaining members. The elders of the society decided then to disband North Union. They moved the twenty-seven persons to other colonies, and in 1889 the site of the Shaker town was sold to a Buffalo, New York, land development company for $316,000. It was an unhappy end to the seventy-seven year experiment in communistic living which had contained the seeds of its own failure through its ban on conjugal relations, and its complete dependence on outside recruitment for a continuing renewal of membership.

As recently as 1960, there were twenty-seven Shakers living in the United States- fourteen at Sabbathday Lake, Maine; eleven at East Canterbury, New Hampshire, and two at Hancock, Massachusetts. When the number has dwindled to five, according to an old prediction, the Shaker movement will revive.

There are few remaining vestiges of the old Cleveland colony among the elegant tree-shaded boulevards and the sumptuous neighborhoods of Shaker Heights today. Two stone gateposts still stand at the southwest comer of Lee Road and Shaker Boulevard, and there are two tiny cemeteries, as well as another burial ground in the yard of a private residence. But by far the most important existing remainder of the Shakers is a trio of ponds, the shimmering Shaker Lakes, around which are grouped some of the choicest properties in this choicest of suburbs. The lakes were created by the Shakers with the dams which they built for their grist mills. Some Shakerites with a proper sense of history, members of the Shaker Historical Society, have succeeded in recent years in assembling an impressive collection of clothing, furniture, utensils, and other valuable relics of the ill-fated colony. They are on display in a makeshift museum housed in Moreland School at Van Aken Boulevard and Lee Road.

Sister Mildred Barker, co-trustee of the Shaker Colony at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, visited the museum several years ago and displayed the unfaltering confidence of the religious society when she told the Shaker Historical Society’s members that the experiments in Cleveland and elsewhere had not been failures.

“Shakerism is no failure,” she said. “It is good, and therefore of God, and no good is ever a failure. The principles and ideals which the Shakers were first to expound have gone out into the world and, like a pebble dropped into the water, we cannot measure the distance of the influence they have borne.

“First in so many things we now take for granted- sex equality, religious tolerance, and so forth- Shakerism is not dying out, nor is it a failure.”