Charcoal portrait of Elijah Myrick (Courtesy photo from the Harvard Historical Society)
As a nearly lifelong resident of Myrick Lane, I have rarely stopped to think about my home street’s name. Though I have frequented the neighboring routes—Ann Lees, Babbitt, Simon Atherton—it hadn’t ever occurred to me that their names might have something in common. A recent eye-opening walk through the Harvard Shaker Cemetery quickly shed some light on the mystery.
Rather than simply being eccentric, these streets are named after Shakers, the utopian religious group that found a home in Harvard from the late 1700s to the early twentieth century, so named in part for their wild dancing, their unique ceremonial practice for “shaking off” sin.
Lee or Lees?
There are the familiar neighborhood names: plenty of Babbitts and Myricks and even a Blanchard or two. In lieu of the traditional “white lollipop” Shaker markers, Elijah Myrick’s name was there as well, carved into regal stone. Boasting a relatively impressive age of death for his time (67), I figured Elijah might have had more than a little to do with the road I lived on.
Though I now had a starting point, one question remained unanswered: why had the name of the road honoring the most prominent Shaker of them all been changed? A few years ago, the Ann Lee Road of my childhood had become, almost overnight, Ann Lees Road. Having been offered no explanation, the neighbors and I assumed an apostrophe had been misplaced in an attempt to give Ann Lee possession of the street. After all, she was the greatest advocate for the Shaker lifestyle in eighteenth-century New England, and the woman most responsible for bringing it to Harvard.
But sitting in the historical section of the Harvard Public Library with a yellowed tome in hand, I realized I should have given my town a little more credit. Ann Lee is often referred to as Mother Ann Lee, but her last name was shortened after coming to the United States from England—from Lees to the Americanized Lee.
Changing the name of the road, it seems, was merely an effort to be historically accurate in honoring the founder of Harvard’s most famous movement.
A fountain of youth
Similarly, the other Shakers whose names appear on street signs have reason enough to be there. There are five Babbitt names in the Shaker Cemetery, signifying their prominence in Shaker society. Among them is Eliza Babbitt, a village leader and an elder of the community. Though she is not buried with them, Tabitha Babbitt is credited with the invention of the circular saw. Modern Babbitt Lane residents may have used Tabitha’s innovation without realizing its connection to their street.
Incidentally, in the late eighteenth century the Babbitts deeded land over to the Atherton family, naming them trustees. According to Henry Nourse’s “History of Harvard,” Simon Atherton was a Shaker trustee for over 50 years, and helped the community to prosper and flourish.
Elder Elijah Myrick was another respected leader of his time. According to Dianne Newton’s “The Harvard Album,” E. E. Hersey, a curator for the Harvard Historical Society in the 1930s, described Myrick as “dignified, unhurried, cheerful, and ready to talk…He traveled about quite a bit in the interests of the development of Shaker products.” In particular, Elijah peddled bottled water from a spring near Oak Hill believed to be a “Fountain of Youth” with medicinal healing properties. The Harvard Shakers had incredible durability, with the common life span in the seventies, and sales of “Elijah Myrick’s Shaker Spring Water” were profitable. A sign advertising the water is even on display at the Fruitlands museum.
Though there are no longer any practicing Shakers living in Harvard, it is clear the town will never forget their legacy. Immortalized in green and white, the names of these Shakers will live on for centuries.
Rachel Fitterman, a 2012 graduate of the Bromfield School, will be a sophomore this fall at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and is a summer intern at the Press.
