The Southern Culture in Kentucky’s Shaker Villages

Co-Sponsored by Kentucky Humanities --an independent, nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Kentucky’s Shaker villages, South Union and Pleasant Hill, drew converts from the South. Those converts brought their own well-established manners, customs, and cultural biases into environments and systems that had been designed by Shakers rooted in the Northeast. 

South Union, in particular, had a difficult time adapting and, consequently, created a material culture and maintained a folklife that was unique among Shaker villages. From the food they ate to the furniture they produced ...  from the way they spoke to the methods in which they constructed buildings ... the Kentucky Shakers were set apart from their northern counterparts. 

Kentucky's Shaker Villages' stories are colorful, humorous, heart-breaking and fascinating.

Tommy Hines is a graduate of Western Kentucky University with an undergraduate degree in Music Theory and Folk Studies, and a Master of Arts degree in Historic Preservation and has spent his career as Executive Director of South Union Shaker Village. 

Hines received the Ida Lee Willis Service to Preservation Award from the Kentucky Heritage Council (2001), the Edith Bingham Excellence in Preservation Education Award from Preservation Kentucky (2018), and the Frank R. Levstik Award for Professional Service from the Kentucky Historical Society (2020).

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