during the early 1800s. Later converts were often orphans or widowed mothers who brought their young children with them when they joined. For them, the Shakers provided a refuge from the hardships of the outside world.

Next, we crossed to the Meeting House, where a woman named Roberta Burns sang Shaker songs and demonstrated their slow, shuffling dance, asking her audience to imagine the sound of her voice and feet multiplied by hundreds of believers. Later we watched brooms being made and visited a carpenter’s shop, where my husband admired a double-tenoned, tabled scarf joint—an ingenious method of joining two heavy beams end to end. By 6:00 P.M., the fall sunlight slanted sharply across the grass, the last few cars pulled out of the parking lot, and those of us who were staying began to get that singular proprietary feeling that comes when you’re someplace extraordinary after-hours.

We checked into a room on the third floor of the East Family Dwelling. How authentic were our accommodations? It seemed to me that Pleasant Hill has found about the right blend of historical flavor and modern comfort. In Shaker days men would have slept on one side of the house, women on the other, but now couples can stay together. Our room had a bare floor with rag rugs and a simple wooden bed. Whatever light we had came from a few candles, and although they were powered by electricity (real ones would have endangered the building), they cast a soft, nineteenth-century glow. We had a brand-new bathroom, a telephone, a television set. But the Shakers had no quarrel with progress; they invented a host of laborsaving devices and were quick to embrace new technology. My husband idly turned on the television. Swept up in religious fervor, I turned it off.

Around eight o’clock, we went to dinner in the building known as the Trustees’ Office, where a pair of spiral staircases ascends three stories. They were designed by Micajah Burnett to conserve space while allowing men and women to remain separate even when descending the stairs. Dining, we had been told, was family-style, which to me suggested a limited menu, bright lighting, and forced cheeriness in the company of strangers. Instead, we ate by candlelight at our own table, choosing from a selection of Kentucky and Shaker specialties, including a tart lemon pie made with the whole lemon. (The Pleasant Hill Shakers used to travel to New Orleans by boat to sell their wares, returning on foot with cash and lemons, a haul too precious to waste.)

After dinner, we went back to the East Family Dwelling and crept upstairs, reluctant to disturb the quiet. The common rooms, where I had seen guests gathered earlier in the evening, were empty now, their chairs casually grouped for conversations since ended. Those chairs struck me as the rightful inhabitants of the place, brethren and sisters not quite ready to turn in.

The next morning ,I was up and dressed

at about six; I wanted very much to see the village by first light. Other guests were out walking too. Wondering if Pleasant Hill worked the same magic on everyone, I found myself eager to talk to them. The early risers were from Indiana, Georgia, and Tennessee, and some of them were here for their third visit. We found an urn of coffee waiting for us outside the dining room. Breakfast was whatever you wanted from a buffet, after which a waitress passed a basket of tiny pumpkin muffins. I may have had eleven.

Marcheta Sparrow had mentioned that the Shaker who kept the journal for the East Family was an unusually good writer, and before I left I asked to see it. Written by Benjamin Dunlavy, the journal covered the years from 1856 to 1870 and was beautiful to look at, with great swooping calligraphic capitals and rarely a crossed-out word. He concentrates his observations on weather and rainfall, but he also records village life during the Civil War, when the pacifist Shakers fed Union and Confederate troops alike. On October 11, 1862, he writes, “Such a day as this was never witnessed on Pleasant Hill before, and God grant that it never may again.” He describes hearing the “roar of artillery” announcing that the “work of death and destruction was going on within eight or ten miles of this sacred spot.” The Shakers set up a table outside the Trustees’ Office for a train of Confederate wagons en route to Lexington. “We have fed more than a thousand persons today,” he writes. “And yet they beg food and clothing, and almost everything used for the comforts of life. They offer to purchase everything they call for, but we have but little for them except provisions, and we have uniformly declined any compensation for these.”

I found just one reference to Shaker furniture in the journal. The entry for October 27, 1864, reads: “We introduced Chairs instead of benches in our dining room.” But I enjoyed his entries on days when a believer decided to leave the village; absconded is the word he uses. Sometimes he manages to withhold judgment, but often he can’t resist adding a phrase like “Good riddance” or “A poor stick!” or, the day a group of men and women left together, “A Budgett of hypocrisy!” Many East Family runaways later returned and were readmitted, but the journal accurately records a decline in membership as the century wore on. About five hundred believers lived and worked at Pleasant Hill during the 1820s and 1830s. After the war the number steadily dwindled. Pleasant Hill closed its doors (and held the auction I’d read about) in the early 1920s. Today, there are only eight Shakers remaining in the United States, all living in a community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

I hoped to take home a souvenir from Kentucky, and as we were leaving we stopped at the gift shop, where travelers can buy

Shaker-inspired boxes, baskets, rugs, and sconces. Would a single candle on a sconce transform a toy-strewn city apartment into a refuge of contemplation and order? Probably not. I would have bought a broom, but I suspected it would cause consternation at the airport security gate. Empty-handed, we got into our car and set off for the world. “Silly lambs,” our entry in the journal might have read. “You will wish you were in the fold when the wolves get you!”

—Jane Colihan