In February 1835 Elder Freegift Wells at the Shaker community at Watervliet, New York, finished cutting out paper seed bags for the season. These bags, or “seed papers” as the Shakers called them, were soon filled with the 1834 crop of garden seeds and offered for sale through...

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841. Shakers numbered things. They numbered rooms for the ease of keeping their domestic life in order, and they numbered products to keep a consistency in manufacture and mark...