Shaker village views: Joshua Bussell's unexpected return to the drawing board

Magazine Antiques, August, 2003 by Robert P. Emilen

Throughout much of the nineteenth century. Shaker brethren from Maine to Kentucky created illustrated maps and landscaps drawings picturing the communal villages where they worked and worshiped. Ranging from topographic maps to landscape representations, these village views were made by self-taught artists to record the unique built environment of their Shaker life.

The most prolific of these Shaker artists was Joshua H. Bussell whose first maps and drawings of Shaker villages in Maine in the 1840s and 1850s were the subject of an article in this magazine in 1978. In the mid-1870s, after a hiatus of perhaps a quarter of a century. Bussell returned to his drawing board to record again the evolving appearance of the Maine Shaker communities. The definitive study of his work as an artist appeared in 1987 in Shaker Village views, a comprehensive examination of these pictorial documents by Shaker artists in the nineteenth century.

Since then two previously unrecorded landscape views and one sketch made by Bussell late in his artistic career have come to light. They illuminate both his ongoing attempts to improve his skills as an artist and his revival between 1875 and 1880 of this unique genre of documentary illustration. To place these new discoveries in context requires a review of what was previously known about Bussell and his work.

Though a cobbler by training, in 1845 Bussell started drawing maps of the three communal Shaker "families" at his home village at Alfred, Maine. Illustrated with topographical features, interspersed with written text, labeled with a numbered key, and oriented with a directional arrow, each of these drawings was clearly intended to serve as a tool for organizing the spatial lives of the Shakers. Occasionally the Shakers sent copies of these drawings to their spiritual sisters and brethren in distant villages, to help one another picture their homes and to strengthen the bond among the communities.

Through the late 1840s each new drawing by Bussell revealed his ongoing attempts to refine his drawing technique in accord with the Shaker ideal of laboring to achieve perfection in daily life. At about this time he encountered an engraving of the Shaker village at Canterbury, New Hampshire, and by studying it he absorbed the fundamentals of perspective drawing. Soon he was making picturesque views of the Shaker villages at Canterbury, at Alfred, and at the community in New Gloucester, Maine, now called Sabbathday Lake, along with its novitiate family across the town line on Poland Hill.

Then, after producing four drawings of Sabbathday Lake and Poland Hill, each bearing the putative date of January 1, 1850, Bussell stopped making pictures. (3) In the mid-nineteenth century the Maine Shaker villages had assumed their mature forms. The Shakers' numbers were beginning to dwindle, and they had no need to create additional buildings or to expand their landholdings beyond those recorded in these drawings. Perhaps Bussell thought his task of documenting the Shaker landscape was done. Or, perhaps he had satisfied his own need to learn the techniques of landscape painting.

In any case, in the years following the Civil War the Maine Shakers began to set their sights on the fertile farmlands to the west. Like many of their neighbors across rural New England, they were attracted by the prospect of a new life in a more hospitable climate, and they began to investigate the possibilities for selling their home villages in Maine. What they discovered, however, was that the distinctive organization of Shaker villages made it difficult to adapt them to another use. Much of the value of their property was concentrated in substantial buildings, which the Shakers constructed in close proximity to one another in order to facilitate the interaction of their communal life. Though their open lands proved to be marketable, in the end they could not find buyers who could also use a village of buildings clustered so tightly on the landscape. Ultimately instead of selling everything and moving west, the Maine Shakers reconsidered their options and decided to apply their energies to improving their existing properties. (4)

The Alfred Shakers raised capital for renovations by selling off outlying timberlands, which they reinvested in the infrastructure of their community. Chimneys were added, roofs replaced, windows rebuilt, and plumbing brought into the dwelling houses. Buildings were painted and fences were whitewashed. In the account the Maine Shakers kept to record significant occurrences in their communities, Otis Sawyer, an elder in the Maine ministry, wrote in 1876

Already we see in the last five years much needed important and expensive repairs made on several buildings namely the Sisters Shop, the Ministry's neat Cottage, the Office, the Stable, New buildings for storage, and conveniences for the office with expenditures more or less on nearly all the buildings in the place. It is plainly evident that repairs and paint have materially changed and improved the exterior aspect of the village. (5)