In Simple Gifts, June Sprigg tells the story of one of America's last
Shaker communities--Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, New
Hampshire--during its twilight years, and of its seven remarkable
"survivor" women, who were among the last representatives of our
longest-lived and best-known communal utopian society. As a college
student Sprigg spent a summer among them, and here she gracefully
interweaves the narrative of their lives with the broader history of
Shakers in America as she shows us how her experiences there affected
her own life and opened the door to her creativity.
Gleaning information from old records and journals that she pored over
that summer and later, Sprigg brings to life the generations of
Canterbury Shakers from the eighteenth century to the present--their
customs, their architecture, their spirituality. She also explores the
social and cultural forces and the internal imperatives and tensions
that caused membership to decrease, all of which, by 1972, brought the
community to crisis.
Chronicling the daily life of the village as she found it, Sprigg
uncovers the affirming energies of the Shakers--the prominence of mutual
love and respect, the devoted tradition of mothering surrogate children,
and, above all, the surviving women's spirited eccentricities. She
reveals the Shakers as individuals--their personal histories, their
wildly different beginnings, what they gave up to join the Shaker
community, and, more important, what they gained.
Through her lively text and drawings and her intimate connection with
the community, Sprigg brings us close to its people with a book that
both enlightens and inspires.
