The Stroh’s house in Shaker Village was the first stop for participants in the Shaker Seminar Conference tour on July 30. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Jonathan Feist (right) tells guests about his home in the former Shaker Meetinghouse.

The Shaker herb-drying shed was at one point used as a residence and is where T.S. Eliot was rumored to have had an affair.

The bedroom where Mother Ann Lee spent her time in Harvard’s Shaker Village.

Tour participants check out the Shaker “lollipop” cemetery.

A story about a Shaker sister's white socks and bright blue tennis shoes was a clue that the group recently visiting Harvard's Shaker Village was not just any group. And tour guide Jonathan Feist's reference to T. S. Eliot's "torrid affair" with a non-religious Shaker Village resident was clearly not the version he annually gives Hildreth Elementary School second graders.

Guides and guests alike had stories to tell when Feist, who lives with his wife and two young sons in the 1791 Shaker Meetinghouse, and Elsa and Richard Stroh, owners of the historic Square House, opened their homes two weeks ago to serious Shaker history enthusiasts and professionals from across the country who were attending the Shaker Seminar Conference, an annual conference of talks, tours, and social gathering that this year turned its focus to the Harvard and Shirley Shaker villages. According to Feist, Harvard is one of the key spiritual Shaker sites.

Cameras and tape measures in hand, participants examined architectural details at close range, comparing them to other Shaker buildings and puzzling out origin and purpose. Shaker lives began to come into focus through their buildings. When Feist drew attention to nickel-sized inserts in the Meetinghouse floor that marked positions for dancers, one could almost imagine Shakers performing their intricate group movements there in his living room. But no one, including the Strohs, had an explanation for two large sealed chambers in the Square House basement. One stone-walled chamber was accessible from inside a kitchen cupboard, but no entrance to the other had been found and its contents were unknown.

Elsa Stroh pointed out an irregular floor board pattern in a bedroom in the Square House as evidence of a secret staircase and escape route for Shadrach Ireland, an eccentric New Light religious leader for whom the house was built in 1769. According to Stroh, Ireland believed that achieving personal perfection would lead to immortality. Unlike the Shakers who would later live in his house and absorb his followers, Ireland's personal perfection did not involve celibacy. Indeed, the staircase, a rooftop lookout, and a belled warning system were protections from authorities who were after him as much for abandoning his wife and four children in Charlestown for a life with his "spiritual consort" as for breaking with the established state church. Ireland had instructed his followers to wait for his resurrection when he died, and wait they did—until the stench became too strong and they secretly buried his body in a cornfield.

A year later, in 1781, on a visit from her New York state community, Mother Ann Lee approached Ireland's leaderless followers at the Square House, claiming to have seen them and the house in a previous vision. As she was probably hoping, she found people receptive to her religious ideas. For the next two years, the Square House became the home base for Lee's successful efforts to garner converts in New England. It was not an easy time for the early Shakers who were harassed by the Harvard community, including a brutal and violent attempt to drive them out of town.

Lee's bedroom at the Square House has remained significant to the Shakers. The Sabbathday Shakers "were just overwhelmed to be here" when they visited Harvard, said Stroh. "The first thing they did was come to this room and pray for about 15 minutes."

With apparent fondness, participants privately began to recall their own past experiences with the no-longer-living elder sisters at the Canterbury Lake Village in New Hampshire and the three remaining at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Winnie Ferguson remembered her surprise at seeing blue tennis shoes and white socks on the diminutive and impressive Eldress Gertrude Soule, whose feet did not touch the floor when she was seated. Soule, who died in 1988 at 93, tried to explain Shakerism to "the world" and is famously remembered for saying she didn't "want to be remembered as a chair."

"I have admiration for them as people who truly lived their religion," said Darlene Kohrman, a college mathematics professor from Michigan, who has attended the annual Shaker Seminar series since 1978. Like many on the tour, her initial attractions to the Shakers had evolved to a primary interest in their spiritual beliefs and community.

Carol Medlicott, a professor at North Kentucky University and Shaker music scholar, led the group in singing the lovely "Square House Hymn," a precision-cadenced hymn written in 1848 to remind new and future Shakers of the importance of their Mother's House.

The tour ended as did the Harvard Shakers, in the South Shaker Road cemetery.

"Is that Rust-Oleum?" someone asked, referring to the shiny, white finish on the newly powder-coated cast-iron markers. No, "it's a heresy," another participant replied.  [see related story ]

And the torrid affair? One man claimed to have met Eliot's lover in her later years, but Feist was not one to name names.