At Hancock Shaker Village, the Past Is Joining the Present

Jennifer Trainer Thompson visited Hancock Shaker Village after moving to the Berkshires in the mid-1980s. She wandered around the pastoral landscape and through the 19th-century Round Stone Barn and learned about the industrious lifestyle of the religious sect that had lived there.

Then, like many village visitors, she mostly forgot about the place.

“I came once because I was intrigued,” she said. “I came back the next time when I had little kids because I wanted to see baby animals. But there was no reason to return, because especially in this day and age, so many other things beckon: your phone, your activities, your friends, your life.”

When Trainer Thompson took over as president and chief executive of Hancock Shaker Village in January 2017, she wanted to compel visitors to return. She saw the potential to expand the allure of the living history museum where the Shakers, a small Christian sect best known for its celibacy and simplicity, had settled in 1790. It remains a working farm with painstakingly preserved architecture.

Since she started the job, she has begun farm-to-table dinners featuring prominent speakers, and a roots-music series sponsored by a local microbrewery. The village hosted goat yoga classes through the summer and an exhibition of contemporary art inspired by Shaker ideals.

The closing date of the season was extended from mid-November to the week before Christmas to add holiday events. It will open for this season on April 14.

Village attendance in 2017 reached 56,000, the highest level in a dozen years and an almost 10 percent jump from the prior year. Membership climbed 25 percent.

“To survive, you want more visitors, and there needed to be more ways to experience it, and to show the beauty and value of the place," Trainer Thompson, 61, said from her office overlooking the grounds.

Museums of all types are seeking ways to entice new audiences, especially millennials. Many living history museums have added immersive activities. Indiana’s Conner Prairie, for example, offers a nighttime event enabling participants to play the role of escaped slaves traveling through the state’s Underground Railroad.

“People, increasingly in the 21st century, are much more into experience,” said Tom Kelleher, historian and curator of mechanical arts at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts and secretary-treasurer of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums. “It’s not just our field. I think it’s the world in general, and we’re trying to keep up with it.”

At Hancock Shaker Village, attendance had stagnated for the past decade at around 49,000 a year. The museum lost money in 2007 but was breaking even by the time Trainer Thompson arrived, she said.

The new activities brought in $83,000 last year — a small fraction of the museum’s annual $1.8 million budget. Nine sessions of goat yoga, which allows animals to roam among posing participants, produced $9,000.

More important than the revenue, Trainer Thompson said, yoga attendees’ Facebook posts generated about 37,000 views and prompted their friends, many in their 30s, to discover or return to the village. A few yoga participants bought memberships.

Food seemed an ideal opportunity to Trainer Thompson, who has written cookbooks and raised chickens. She brought in Brian Alberg, vice president of culinary development for the renowned Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and a champion of the regional food scene, to overhaul the museum cafe menu. He scrapped several of the salads and sandwiches for Shaker staples like brown bread and locally raised lamb.

“My idea was to bring the village into the kitchen and the kitchen into the village," Alberg said.

He also designed the menus for occasional field dinners and for the speaker series called Food for Thought. Presenters scheduled for this year include writer Roy Blount Jr. and Francis J. Greenburger, the real estate mogul and philanthropist.

Trainer Thompson, who spent 28 years at Mass MoCA, the contemporary art museum in nearby North Adams, turned the Shaker Village’s 1910 wooden barn — previously used to store hay and the remnants of a dismantled sawmill — into a venue for the Shaker Barn Music concerts, which will continue this year.

Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant has committed to a separate benefit concert in September. This year the village also will host the Northeast Fiddlers’ Convention, the world premiere of a Shaker-themed play and a food industry retreat called Emerging Tastes.

And even a historic village needs modern technology. On her second day, Trainer Thompson realized her smartphone calendar would not sync and ordered an update of the museum’s network, installing Wi-Fi throughout the property. “I felt it was critical for social media, for people — if they’re having fun at a concert in our barn — to be able to post it on Instagram.”

On a beautiful evening in July, during intermission for a Sarah Lee Guthrie concert, audience members strolled outside the barn and sipped craft beer. Down the hill, they could see the chicken coop and its residents pecking at the grass.

Suddenly, a fox appeared, snatched a hen and ate it. A few concertgoers looked aghast, Trainer Thompson said, but she recounted the incident with a degree of delight.

It was a truly authentic experience at Hancock Shaker Village.