Hancock Shaker Village

I went to Hancock Shaker Village primarily to see if their garden had any flowers worth photographing. I also looked through the village and its buildings, but since I've been there many times before I didn't tour everything.

 I found this plant in the medicinal herb garden.  It's called Button Snakeroot, and was grown by the Shakers for treating kidney ailments.  All kinds of kidney ailments, apparently -- mosts of the plants in the garden are labeled in such a non-specific way.  There were lots of bees around, pollinating away.

The garden had foxglove, from which digitalis is derived (and the Latin name of the plant is also digitalis).  I didn't photograph the foxglove, since it had bloomed and withered.  The photo below shows Black Cohosh in the foreground, with the 1826 Round Barn in the background.  Black Cohosh was used to treat rheumatism, dropsy, epilepsy, and "spasmodic afflictions."

Inside the round barn.  This wall of what look like wall studs held the cows' heads still while they were being milked.  Some of the vertical pieces pivot, opening for the cow to insert its head and then closing around the cow's neck.

I stopped at the blacksmith's shop, where this old gentleman was working the forge.  He's a volunteer who does blacksmithing as a hobby and comes to the Village one day a week to demonstrate the trade.

In the next-to-last picture above, he's made a small hook in the end of the iron bar.  In the last one, he's bending the bar in the shape of a large hook, using the anvil.  The piece will end up being an S-shaped hook for hanging plants and the like.  The Shakers' blacksmithing operation was just to produce hardware for in-house use, such as door latches, hinges, and other domestic iron objects.

The Shakers' living quarters were in a large brick structure with dormitory rooms and a large communal dining room.  This is one of the dining tables, showing the simple furniture design and tableware.

The "Shaker pegs" that we've all seen were not just pegs for hanging clothing.  Chairs were hung on the wall when not in use, clearing the floor space.  They were Shakers, after all; they needed space for dancing.

As I was leaving, I noticed this building that has obviously settled over the decades.  The Shakers would never have put up a building in which the windows were arranged in a wavy line.