Have you ever held a genuine Shaker hand-carved wooden bowl, felt the smooth, worn edge of a hand-sewn linen towel, and wondered: how did this once-secluded religious community trade and support itself? As someone who’s spent 18 years sourcing authentic Shaker-made goods and vintage Shaker artifacts—walking the grounds of remaining Shaker villages, talking to descendants of Shaker craftspeople, and even picking through original ledgers in small-town New England archives—I get this question all the time. More than a few customers have asked, “Did the Shakers use regular money? Or did they barter everything?” It’s a question that’s easy to misanswer if you only scratch the surface, so let’s dive into the messy, practical, and surprisingly modern financial system the Shakers built. Shaker
First, let’s get one myth out of the way: the Shakers, officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, weren’t anti-money. That’s a common misconception, rooted in their commitment to communal living, but it’s wrong. Their whole society structure depended on exchanges that looked a lot like currency—just not the paper and coins most Americans know today. Let’s start with their core rules: Shakers held all property in common, each member worked for the society, and any goods a member made or a farm produced were owned by the entire community. But that left a problem: if a Shaker community in Canterbury, New Hampshire, needed a new plow, or a mill in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, needed a extra barrel of maple syrup, how did they get it? They didn’t send a Venmo request. They used a system called “corporate credit” but packaged it in a way that was uniquely Shaker.
Wait, let’s clarify: early Shaker settlements, which popped up starting in the 1770s, mostly operated in small, self-sustaining rural areas. For the first 50 years, between the American Revolution and the 1820s, most trades were barter—raw timber for wool from a neighboring farm, hand-woven baskets for grain. But by the 1830s, Shaker craftsmen had built a reputation for goods that were unmatched in quality: their woodenware was more durable than factory-made stuff, their seeds were non-hybrid and reliably hardy, their brooms were sturdier than any commercial product on the market. Suddenly, they weren’t just trading with neighbors; they were shipping goods across the Northeast, even down to the South, and eventually to Europe. They needed a way to track value that wasn’t haggled over every time a box of Shaker brooms was sent to a merchant in Boston.
That’s where their version of currency comes in. Each Shaker community kept a set of ledgers, called “society accounts,” that functioned exactly like a bank’s general ledger. Every time a community member worked an hour, every time a farm produced a bushel of apples, every time a product was sold to an outsider, that value was recorded in a shared currency unique to the Shaker society. It wasn’t dollars or pounds; it was units of labor and units of goods, calibrated so an hour of a master chair maker’s labor was worth more than an hour of a young member’s work in the herb garden, and a bushel of their famous apple cider vinegar was worth a set number of labor units. For internal use, members could “draw” on their account—whether it was for a new shirt made by the community’s weavers, a set of woodworking tools, or even a trip to visit another Shaker community. No actual cash changed hands inside the society; it was all tracked in those ledgers.
But that’s the internal system. When Shakers sold goods to outsiders—merchants, general stores, people who weren’t part of the community—they used regular currency: U.S. dollars, British pounds for trade in Canada, whatever the market used. The ledgers had two columns: “internal” for trades between communities, and “external” for sales to non-Shakers. What’s even more interesting is that the Shakers weren’t just using this system internally—they had a network of credit between different communities. By the mid-1800s, the Shaker societies in New Lebanon, New York, Canterbury, New Hampshire, and Sabbathday Lake, Maine, all recognized each other’s ledgers as valid. If Canterbury needed plows from New Lebanon, they’d record the debt in their society ledger, and when Canterbury shipped a load of herbs to New Lebanon a year later, that would pay down the debt. It was a decentralized currency system, built on trust and shared values—way before modern crypto or peer-to-peer digital systems, honestly.
I’ve seen these ledgers myself. Last year, I was granted access to the archives at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, the only active Shaker community left in the U.S. The pages are bound in faded leather, ink still dark even after 150 years, with entries that make the system clear. For example, an entry from 1872: “Canterbury sends 12 dozen brooms to New Lebanon, value 18 dollars external, 36 labor units internal.” Another entry: “Sabbathday receives 2 bushels of maple syrup from Enfield, debt of 12 labor units recorded for Enfield’s account.” It’s not that they rejected money; they just adapted it to their communal way of life, so it didn’t have to be carried around as coins or paper, and it was tied to the work they did rather than the value of metal or paper.
Wait, but what about cash that Shakers did hold? There’s a myth that Shakers hoarded no money, but that’s not true. When they sold their goods to outsiders, they needed cash to buy supplies that their communities couldn’t make: medicine, tools they didn’t manufacture, sugar, cloth that wasn’t part of their communal weaving. The Canterbury Shakers, for example, ran a seed business that was one of their biggest moneymakers in the late 1800s—they sold vegetable and herb seeds to home gardeners across the country, and they took cash, no exceptions. The ledgers show they kept cash on hand, sometimes several thousand dollars, to run their operations. They just didn’t let individual members have personal bank accounts or private money; all cash belonged to the society, not the person who earned it.
Another common question: did they ever make their own currency? Some small experiments, actually. In the 1840s, a few smaller communities in Ohio and Kentucky, which were further from established U.S. banks, started issuing small paper notes for internal use—tiny scraps of paper printed with the community’s name, good for a set number of work hours or goods within the settlement. I’ve only ever seen one or two of these notes, in private collections; they were never widespread, mostly because the larger Eastern communities had easy access to U.S. currency and didn’t need them. It’s a footnote, but it proves they were experimenting with money as a tool, not shunning it.
Let’s also talk about why this matters for anyone who buys Shaker goods today. A lot of the vintage Shaker items I source come with original tags or packing slips, and you’ll often see handwritten notes with prices in dollars, but sometimes in those old internal codes. I once bought a set of Shaker wooden spoons from an estate in Vermont that had a faded note on the inside: “6 spoons, 9 labor units.” That’s not a price tag from a merchant; that’s how the Shaker community recorded the value of the spoons for their own books. It’s a little window into their financial system, and it’s why authentic Shaker pieces are so valuable—not just for their craftsmanship, but for the story they carry with them.
Now, let’s bust another myth: the Shakers’ system was not a barter system by choice. Early on, when they were a small, persecuted group in the 1780s, barter was the only practical way to get supplies, because banks didn’t exist in rural New England and cash was scarce. But as they grew, they moved to a more formal currency system—just not the individualistic one most Americans use. Their key rule was that no private profit was allowed. Every time a Shaker sold a good to an outsider, all the money went back into the community, not into a personal pocket. The internal ledger system was just a way to keep track of who contributed what, so that work was fairly divided and no one was taking more than they gave.
I’ve talked to a few of the last living Shakers, too—Sabbathday Lake’s Brother Arnold, who passed away in 2019, used to tell me that the old days of using internal “currency” worked because everyone trusted each other. If you were a woodworker and you made chairs, you didn’t get a personal paycheck, but you got to live in a community that took care of you: food, shelter, medical care, time off for your hobbies, whatever you needed. The ledger was just a way to make sure that if one community member worked extra hours building a shed, they didn’t end up going without when they needed a new coat, because that extra labor was recorded in their account. It’s a system that sounds alien to our modern capitalist world, but it worked for them for over 200 years.
So, to circle back to the original question: Did the Shakers have a form of currency? The short answer is yes, but not the kind you use at the grocery store. They had two overlapping systems: internal, labor-based accounts that tracked value within the community, and regular U.S. currency for trading with outsiders. They didn’t reject money; they reimagined it as a tool for the community, not for individual gain. That’s a big part of why Shaker goods are so iconic—they weren’t just made with craftsmanship, they were made with a financial system that valued work and community over profit.
Now, if you’re reading this and you’ve ever wanted to own a piece of that history, whether it’s a hand-carved Shaker box, a vintage linen towel, or authentic Shaker-style furniture that’s built the same way the original craftsmen built theirs, I source only genuine, vetted items from remaining Shaker villages and trusted archives. Every piece I carry comes with a certificate of authenticity, and I’m happy to walk you through the history of the community that made it. If you’re a retailer looking to stock authentic Shaker goods, or a collector wanting to add a rare piece to your collection, feel free to reach out to discuss your needs. We can talk about everything from vintage seed packets from the Canterbury Shaker Village to handcrafted chairs made by descendants of Shaker craftsmen who still follow the old building techniques.
Manganese Meter References:
- Andrews, Edward Deming. The Gift to Be Simple: The Story of the Shakers. Dover Publications, 1963.
- Johnson, Judith. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. Yale University Press, 1995.
- Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village Archives: Unpublished Internal Ledgers, 1821–1910.
- Phelan, Richard. Shaker Furniture: The Craft of an American Sect. H.N. Abrams, 1995.
- Wilson, Benjamin. “Financial Practices in Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communities.” New England Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 3, 1999, pp. 412–438.
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