VARIOUS SHAKER COMMUNITIES, NEW YORK AND NEW ENGLAND, MID TO LATE 19TH CENTURY

A remarkable assemblage of the iconic swallow tail fingered oval ulitilty boxes, these twelve examples are notable for their original painted or natural-finished surfaces. As identified by David Schorsch in his 1982 invoice, many of these boxes can be attributed to specific Shaker communities from the mid to late nineteenth century. With box no. 1 being the smallest and box no. 12 the largest, these comprise boxes 1, 3, 6 from New Lebanon, New York, box 4 from Sabbathday Lake, Maine, box 7 from Watervliet, New York and box 9 from Hancock, Massachusetts. However, box 6 bears the inscription from Maria Lyman/ Christmas/ 1904 and probably hails from the community of Enfield, Connecticut, where Sister (Sarah) Maria Lyman (1833-1918) was one of the last members. In 1917, she left the community and moved to Watervliet, New York where she died the following year (see Stephen Miller, "The Copley-Lyman Shaker Family of Enfield, Connecticut: An Annotated Genealogy," American Communal Societies Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2 (April 2007), pp. 51-72; a photograph of Maria Lyman is in the Graphics Collection, The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford).