Sisters' Retiring Room From the North Family Dwelling, Mount Lebanon, New York, Ca. 1845

Abstract

The Sisters' Retiring Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is historically and architecturally significant, as it comes from the Mount Lebanon Shaker community, which served as the lead village for all of Shakerdom. The ministry, the head elders and eldresses, of Mount Lebanon created buildings, religious rituals, and social practices to serve as models for the other Shaker communities to follow. Furthermore, the room-one of only two that survive from the North Family Dwelling-offers a physical record not only of a nineteenth-century Shaker retiring room but also of the mid-twentieth-century interpretation of Shaker design.