Consider the high you got from successfully sewing your child's last Halloween costume, or from simply pulling off a home-cooked meal when all you really wanted to do was collapse in front of 30 Rock. No matter where you fall on the DIY spectrum, there's something gratifying about making something from scratch in these prepackaged times. Maybe that's why the Shakers—the broom-making, box-carving, fabric-weaving religious sect that believed simple, perfect craftsmanship brought it closer to God—are still so compelling today.
Though the group had all but disappeared by the early 20th century, there's a place where you can still immerse yourself in its quiet, industrious lifestyle: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. With 34 historic buildings and costumed guides belting out "Come All Ye Zion Travelers," the village may initially sound like some place you visited with your sixth-grade class. But plenty elevates it from cool field-trip destination to supremely satisfying vacation spot. For kids, there are wagon rides, barnyard animals, and 3,000 acres of running-around space. For parents, there's the beautifully austere architecture and handcrafted furniture that looks as stylish as anything at Design Within Reach.
A handful of preserved Shaker villages remain in the world—the group started in England as an offshoot of the Quakers and had set up 19 villages in the U.S. by the 1840s—but Pleasant Hill is one of the last to allow overnight visitors. Guests get to stay in the exact rooms where Shakers lived, worked, and prayed from 1805, when the village was founded, until 1910, when it was declared defunct. The guestrooms—a steal at around $100 a night—are furnished to Shaker perfection, with pegboards, rag rugs, and reproduction furniture. (The inn makes a few nods to modernity, however—rooms have updated bathrooms, air conditioning, and even TVs.)
After you check in, the amount of history you take in is up to you (and largely dependent on your kids' ages and attention spans). On any given day, guides might be expounding on the sect's origins, fashioning the oval boxes or brooms for which its craftsmen are famous, or re-creating the group's ecstatic, religiously inspired dances (yes, those Shakers shook). But you can also absorb the Shaker way by just hanging out. The daily agendas sound basic—feed the resident ducks, learn how to fish for bass in the pond, try your hand at hoeing in an heirloom garden—but it's surprising how such simple acts can be both soul-soothing and endlessly thrilling.
When interest in Shaker Village exhibits starts to wane, families can head off-campus. Central Kentucky is a captivating land of horse farms, columned houses, and mom-and-pop restaurants that serve up barbecue and buttermilk pie. You can stick with the trip's wholesome theme by riding a stern-wheel paddleboat up the Kentucky River or heading to a pick-your-own orchard. Or you can indulge in a little vice—this is, after all, bourbon country, and eight nearby distilleries offer tours of their bubbling, Wonka-esque works that will entertain even the way-below-drinking-age members of your brood.
Back at Pleasant Hill, when the day-trippers have gone and the air vibrates with the sound of crickets, you can almost picture the Shakers retiring to their single-sex dormitories as you make for your own (co-ed) bedrooms. Like all Shaker villages, Pleasant Hill required families to renounce marital and parental ties when they signed on—the men joining the Brethren, the women the Sisterhood, and their sons and daughters the Children's Order. Still, as you watch your kids giggling at goats or trying to stomp open black walnuts that have dropped from the trees, you may feel that while the Shakers got so much right, they may have missed out on the most life-affirming thing of all.
Next Page: Getting There, When to Go, Where to Stay, and Where to Eat
