West Family Preserve House

My last post showed a couple of different maps of Pleasant Hill's main cluster of buildings at the spot where US route 63 intersected with Kentucky route 33 before restoration of the village. One of the surviving original Shaker structures is the West Family preserve house, built in 1859 and sandwiched between the West Family wash house and the West Family sister's shop. 

Thanks to the Historic American Buildings Survey, a pre-restoration photo of the preserve house from 1940 exists in the Library of Congress collection.

The building as it appeared in 1940

History buffs/nerds/geeks like me will appreciate the card catalog entry for the photo that has been preserved in the collection:

Accounting Records

Income and expense analyses for the year ended March 31, 1841 shows that the Pleasant Hill Shakers made:

$124.26 on leather transactions

$1,074.07 from the sale of linseed oil

$2,177.18 from the sale of hogs

$1,570.50 from the sale of cattle

$379.00 on horse transactions

$2,468.55 from the sale of garden seeds

Revenues from the sale of leather, cattle, horses, and garden seeds were consistently good throughout the period 1830-1850. Revenues from the manufacture and sale of linseed oil were extremely good during the late 1830′s when linseed oil sold for $1.00 to $1.25 a gallon.

Income from the sale of hogs was consistently good during the period until 1848 when a prohibition against the use of hog meat was made mandatory in all Shaker communities. This prohibition eliminated one of the best sources of revenues for the Pleasant Hill Shakers [Ham, p. 189].

In 1842, the community paid out $2,162.50 for 7205/6 roods of stone fencing at $3.00 per rood. A rood is a unit of length varying locally from five and one-half to eight yards. Over twenty miles of stone fencing was constructed around Pleasant Hill over a twenty-five year period from 1826 to 1852 [Ham, p. 136].

More on Shaker Accounting Records at Pleasant Hill: 1830-1850 can be found here.

On This Date in 1842

October 27, 1842 - All the Brethren and Sisters in the Center Family signed the article of agreement to "quit the use of all strong drink and also the use of tea, Coffy, tobacco, and the use of swines flesh in part." (Morse, p. 111)