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"Hancock Shaker Village is a former Shaker commune in Hancock and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It emerged in the towns of Hancock, Pittsfield, and Richmond in the 1780s, organized in 1790, and was active until 1960. It was the third of nineteen major Shaker villages established between 1774 and 1836 in New York, New England, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.

The village was closed by the Shakers in 1960, and sold to a local group who formed an independent non-profit. This organization now operates the property as an open-air museum. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places and declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1968.

The Shaker religion began in Manchester, England around the year 1747. A group of dissident Christians, they practiced ecstatic worship and egalitarianism. A young woman named Ann Lee gradually emerged as the primary leader of the group. In 1770, she experience visions and revelations taught her that only by renouncing sexual relations could humankind ever achieve entrance into heaven. After enduring persecution in England, the small group of Shakers, led by Lee, set sail for the New York colony in 1774. By 1776, they settled within Watervliet, New York, establishing what became Watervliet Shaker Village. In the winter of 1779-1780, a brief religious revival swept through Baptist and Presbyterian congregations in Columbia County, New York and Berkshire County, Massachusetts. After the revival dissipated in the summer of 1780, many ministers and congregants from these churches investigated the Shakers and began converting. Invigorated by this influx of new converts, the Shakers expanded through missionary trips from 1780 through 1784 throughout the Northeast. Ann and William Lee died in 1784, and their friend and co-minister James Whittaker died in 1787. The movement was then re-organized and institutionalized by the American converts Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright. Shaker converts were gathered into communal villages, where all property was jointly owned."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_Shaker_Village

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