While working on my dissertation, I spent time at the Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Like children in all Shaker communities, children at Pleasant Hill lived in family houses separated by gender (note the separate entrances to both homes in the below photographs). Caretakers, rather than biological parents, raised the children. Ideally Shaker children learned the values of the community and religion and at the age of 21 would take a covenant with the community. However, many left, paralyzing the growth the Shaker population in second half of the nineteenth century.
Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson 