Buildings
The original buildings were log cabins, however, the oldest surviving buildings date to 1820. Each "family" house had a basement, 3 living floors and an attic. Kitchens, including the large kitchens for baking and canning, were located in the basement. Each house had a wing for "sisters" and a wing for "brothers," with separate staircases; the wings were separated by large hall. Not only bedrooms, but sitting rooms were separate. Both sexes shared the dining and meeting rooms, but sat on opposite sides of the room. Typically, 2 to 6 Believers of the same sex shared a bed chamber. The buildings of the North family burned to the ground in 1920. Other buildings were lost to neglect. or torn down over the years. 22 buildings survive.
Collectively, the buildings at Watervliet are regarded as among the finest and best preserved surviving Shaker buildings.
Read more about this topic: Watervliet Shaker Historic District
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)