Room to Grow

Room to Grow. The Centre Family Dwellings. , The early years of the Pleasant Hill community were a time of rapid growth. The Shakers' religious message and ecstatic worship practices found a receptive audience in frontier Kentucky. It was common for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of spectators to attend public meetings., As more Believers gathered in Kentucky, the Shakers needed larger communal dwellings to house the expanding spiritual families. The Centre Family Dwelling, home to the most advanced Believers, went through several, increasingly larger, versions in the first twenty-five years that the Shakers occupied Pleasant Hill., Built in 1809, the first permanent Centre Family Dwelling (now called the Farm Deacon's Shop) housed the eastern Shakers who traveled to the West to lead the new Believers, alongside several local converts. The subsequent dwellings, occupied in 1815 and 1834, were much larger structures with attached kitchens that provided housing for as many as 80 brothers and sisters., "The brethren here have a very heavy joy of work on hand this summer, they dug the cellar last season for a centre House...this House is to be built with stone, the size of it is 60 by 55 feet, two story high, with a Kitchen joining it, 85 feet by 34 feet...", - Pleasant Hill Ministry, April 12, 1825 , Credit: Western Reserve Historical Society, "The great new building for a Centre House, is now going on...we intend to have the building pointed down, the glass put in, and the window shuts and doors hung and painted this season, so that the building will look as well in the course of a few weeks as it will ever look...", - Pleasant Hill Ministry, August 11, 1826 , Credit: Western Reserve Historical Society, (Captions):, The 1824-1834 Centre Family Dwelling from the west. The ruins of the 1815 Centre Family Dwelling in the foreground are a stark reminder that many buildings at Pleasant Hill have been lost to time. , 1940, Background Image: Three structures that each had served as Pleasant Hill's Centre Family Dwelling, seen from the west. Rapid expansion in the 1810s and 1820s necessitated ever larger communal houses for the Believers. , 1896 , Credit: Arthur Younger Ford (1861-1926) photograph albums, 1977.01.158, Photographic Archives, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky