Mount Lebanon Historic Site
One of three sites owned by the Shaker Museum, the Shaker Community site at Mount Lebanon, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993.
Mount Lebanon, in the town of Lebanon, was the first large-scale settlement of the Shakers, and was its spiritual home. It was here that the Shakers developed and practiced equality of labor, gender, and race, as well as communal property, freedom, and pacifism.
The Meeting House: 1824
The Great Stone Barn: 1860
The Great Stone Barn was constructed between 1859 and 1860 at the height of the North Family’s prosperity to house a complex and modern dairying operation. The barn attested to the Shakers’ prowess in agriculture and animal husbandry and demonstrated economic stability. At nearly 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 62 feet high, it is believed to be the largest stone barn in the United States. The last building erected on the site, its interior timber framing was lost to arson in 1972.
The North Family Site: 1880
Location
The village at Mount Lebanon is in northeastern New York near the border of Massachusetts. The grounds and trails at the Historic Mount Lebanon Site are free and open to the public year-round.
202 Shaker Rd.
New Lebanon, NY 12125
The Shakers’ worship services were such a popular draw for the public in the 1820s that the Mount Lebanon Shakers began to plan for a larger meetinghouse in December, 1821. It took nearly two and a half years to get the building ready for its dedication on June 4, 1824. It was a challenging project – both in planning and execution. The new meetinghouse could accommodate several hundred Shakers and over 1,000 visitors. It is a massive building – one of the largest construction projects the Lebanon Shakers had undertaken.
The size of the building brought many challenges, including placing a roof over a 65 foot span without the intermediate posts that would have interfered with the dances performed during Shaker worship; supporting a floor that would bear the weight of hundreds of Shakers moving en masse; building a structure tall enough that the windows would provide light all the way to the center of the room so as to avoid using artificial lighting; and, since the Shakers apparently planned to hold meetings in the building all year, heating a space that contained nearly 100,000 cubic feet.
