Medicine Packaging Room, Center Family, Mount Lebanon, NY, ca. 1880. Shaker sisters and young girls work at packaging A. J. White’s Mother Seigel’s Curative Syrup. Sisters bottled, labeled, and packaged the medicine.
Vat with bottles and carrying case, Center Family, Mount Lebanon, NY, ca 1860s. This vat was used for mixing medicinals made from barks, flowers, leaves, and chopped roots of various plants soaked in a solution.
Shaker sisters were an integral part of manufacturing botanical medicines at Mount Lebanon, filling, corking, labeling, and boxing bottles for shipping. After the Civil War, when the medicinals business flourished, many outside manufacturers subcontracted with the largely female Shaker workforce, finding them well trained, disciplined, and honest. Among other products, Shaker sisters produced nearly 24,000 bottles of Norwood’s Tincture of Veratrum Viride, one of the largest selling medicinal preparations in the world at the time.
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Sharon Duane Koomler is a Shaker scholar and traditional letterpress printer living in upstate New York. She has academic degrees in American Folklore from Indiana University and Western Kentucky University. Sharon has worked at Shaker Museums from Kentucky to New Hampshire as an educator, curator, consultant, and director. She has written and published on Shaker material culture and spirituality, and lectured widely on Shaker art, life, and belief. Sharon has a particular interest in the under-researched social aspects of Shaker life and ways in which Shakers practiced inclusion and intentionality.