Although most of Benjamin Seth Youngs’s journal for 1806 has been lost, elder and historian Harvey L. Eads copied extracts from the original manuscript into the official records of South Union Shaker village. In this excerpt, Youngs reports on a powerful religious meeting among Shaker converts at Eagle Creek, Ohio.
Sabbath [January] 5. In the morning at D. Edie’s. At noon we met with the Believers at John Knox’s, about 30 in number & as many Spectators, to whom John Dunlavy, Richard McNemar. Elders Issachar & Benjamin spoke with a measure of freedom for about 3 hours.
Source
Harvey L. Eads, transcr., Shakers—South Union, Ky., “Record Book A (including Autobiography of John Rankin, Sr.),” 1805–1836, 47, Shakers of South Union, Kentucky, Collection, 1800–1916, MSS 597, Manuscripts and Folklife Archives, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.
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.
