Shaker missionary Benjamin Seth Youngs continued to chronicle his travels and activities for years after his arrival in the west in 1805. Most of these small manuscript booklets have been lost. This one, covering the period from November 1806 to January 1807, includes a brief reference to the jerks among the Shakers at Turtle Creek, Ohio.
The believers met at the Stand. Daniel Potters wife an unbeliever & had a for a long time been a bitter opposer in time of labouring, broke fourth by the power of God, Jerking & dancing with her hair all over her face. B. very unwell having been so near all last week perticularly on the 4th 5th 6th & 7th days.
Source
Benjamin S. Youngs, journal, November 3, 1806–January 22, 1807, no. 6, 14, Shaker Collection, Emma B. King Library, Shaker Museum/Mt. Lebanon, Old Chatham, N.Y.
About Benjamin Seth Youngs (1774–1855)
Born in Schenectady, New York, Benjamin Seth Youngs converted to Shakerism with a large contingent of his family in 1794. During the next decade, Youngs worked alongside Issachar Bates as a missionary in western Massachusetts, upstate New York, and Vermont. In December 1804, Shaker leaders appointed John Meacham, Bates, and Youngs to open the Shaker gospel in the west. Youngs’s extensive travel journal of the missionaries’ “Long Walk” to Kentucky and Ohio includes vivid descriptions of the jerks and other bodily exercises that dominated the Great Revival. He emerged as a prominent leader in the development of western Shakerism, evangelizing, organizing communities, and drafting the sect's first comprehensive theological treatise, The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (1808). Youngs served as elder of the Shaker village at South Union, Kentucky, for more than two decades before being recalled to Watervliet, New York, where he died in 1855.
References
Stephen J. Paterwic, Historical Dictionary of the Shakers, Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, no. 87 (Lanham, Md., 2008), 251–253.
