ABSTRACT
The Shakers established themselves in America after Mother Ann Lee and eight of her followers migrated from England to New York in 1774. They located themselves in a line of millenarian prophets anticipating and preparing for the Second Coming of Christ, a process they believed had begun with the formation of their own society in Lancashire in 1747. Since they believed the church had followed a path of declension since apostolic times they held themselves apart from it and the world of the flesh, maintaining sexual abstinence as a cardinal rule. The distinct but linked communities under the leadership of the community at Lebanon, New York, were partly an expression of separateness but also of the requirements of frontier living. By the 1840s the Shakers reached their historic peak of perhaps 6000 members in eighteen communities. After the Civil War their numbers fell and today only a handful remain.
