On my way home this afternoon, I stopped by Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, in Mercer County, Kentucky. Always a pleasant stop in October.
The shaggy bovine was my first greeter.
I headed past him for the Trustees House, where I wanted to photograph the double stairways. When the Shakers lived at Pleasant Hill, there were separate stairways for men and women. In the Trustees House, the two identical spiral stairways are opposite each other in a wide hallway. From the first floor, they look quite plain.
My favorite view is straight down, though the upward view is also beautiful.
I also admired the simpler steps over the rock fence. The yoked oxen were tethered near it.
I’m not sure the Shakers, with their rigid simplicity, would have approved of the pumpkin and corn shock display, attractive though it was.
Whenever I stop at Pleasant Hill, I think of my fifth-great grandfather, Roger Shackelford (1744-1825). Roger, who served as a Sargeant in the Virginia Regiment of Guards during the American Revolution, moved with his third wife, Sally Laird, and their several children, to another Shaker community, South Union, at Logan, in western Kentucky. By the time Roger and Sally became Shakers, Rogers daughter Adeline, who was my fourth-great grandmother, had married Frederick Binkley and was living in Tennessee.
Roger may have joined the South Union community for religious reasons; or, given that he was an old man when he and Sally entered the community in 1816, he may have been thinking of how to provide for himself in old age, and for her and the children when he was gone. Records at South Union note that residents there called Roger “Old Daddy Shackelford.”
