Economy
The Watervliet Shakers, like all Shaker communities, were almost self-sufficient, raising their own food and producing their own clothing and machinery. They purchased a limited range of goods from outsiders, principally iron, which they worked into hardware and tools in their own workshops.
Each village also produced market goods for outside sale. The Watervliet Shakers had a tannery, produced brooms for sale in volume, and had a small industry manufacturing brass, steel and silver writing pens, but they are most noted in business history as having been among the first producers of garden seeds as a commercial product in the United States and the first Shaker community to have produced and sold seeds. It has been claimed that a member of this community, Theodore Bates, invented the flat broom, older brooms having been fashioned as round bundles of broom corn straw or twigs.
Read more about this topic: Watervliet Shaker Historic District
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical terms.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)