“You’re not the first Mormon missionaries to visit the Shakers,” declared the crusty old curator of the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, N. Y. The two elders were laboring in the Albany district of the Eastern States Mission, where I was serving as their supervising elder in the fall of 1961. I listened with great interest as they enthusiastically related how the old man had gone into another room for a few minutes and emerged clutching a timeworn volume handwritten by one of the early Shakers. The missionaries told me that the curator read to them with considerable relish an account of Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, Leman Copley, and Parley P. Pratt’s visits to the Shaker village of North Union near Kirtland, Ohio.
