Shaker Herbs
(Page 3 of 6)
February/March 1997
By RITA BUCHANAN
In the early years of the nineteenth century, all Shaker
communities collected herbs for their own use and may have sold a
few from time to time. It wasn’t until 1820 that the herb business
took off, continuing through the century. Shakers sold hundreds of
kinds of dried herbs, herb extracts, herb oils, and herbal patent
medicines, earning an income that rivaled or exceeded that of their
horticultural specialty, vegetable seeds. In both businesses, they
were pioneers who developed a desirable product and soon achieved a
reputation for quality, purity, neatness, honesty, and fairness.
Both businesses required careful knowledge of plants, hard labor in
the fields, plenty of hands for sorting and packaging, and
willingness to invent or adopt laborsaving devices to facilitate
the process.
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By 1850, the herb business was peaking as a result of the
Shakers’ inventiveness and hard work. The community at New Lebanon,
New York, was producing as much as 100,000 pounds of dried herbs
and several thousand pounds of extracts annually. Its catalog from
1851 listed 356 medicinal herbs, 4 common culinary herbs, 181 fluid
extracts, and much more. The catalog’s title alone hints at its
depth: A Catalogue of Medicinal Plants, Barks, Roots, Seeds,
Flowers and Select Powders with their Therapeutic Qualities and
Botanical names; also Pure Vegetable Extracts, prepared in vacuo;
Ointments, Inspissated Juices, Essential Oils, Double Distilled and
Fragrant waters, etc.
Inspissated juices were condensed extracts made from poisonous
plants. The fragrant waters were distilled from roses, peach
leaves, sassafras bark, peppermint and spearmint, elder flowers,
and other plants, and used as flavorings and perfumes. The extracts
and ointments were sold in small glass or ceramic bottles or jars.
Most dried herbs and roots were pressed into blocks, then wrapped
in pastel papers and given simple labels.
Another source lists a total of eighty proprietary medicines and
herb products developed and sold at different Shaker communities in
the late nineteenth century. Some products bore simple names and
basic claims, such as Shaker Hair Restorer (“Gray hair may be
honorable, but the natural color is preferable!”), Pain King
(“Orders pain out of doors and sees that the command is obeyed!”),
and Shaker Vegetable Family Pills (“Operate so gently and surely,
yet without straining or distressing the bowels, that no family can
afford to be without them. They break up colds and fevers, and do
away with bilious disorders”). Others had more impressive names and
made more impressive claims—such as Corbett’s Compound
Concentrated Syrup of Sarsaparilla, promoted as a cure for a
number of ills including consumption, exhaustion, and liver,
kidney, blood, and bladder diseases. Whether or not all products
could live up to their claims, the Shakers always emphasized
accurate identification, freshness, purity, quality, neatness, and
respect for the customer. Few manufacturers of patent medicines
were as conscientious as the Shakers, and, as a result, their herbs
and products were shipped throughout the United States and
overseas.
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