A Shaker oval box is a lidded container made by bending a thin band of maple around an oval form, fastening the overlapping end with copper tacks, and fitting a flat pine top and bottom inside. No glue holds it together. In Shaker kitchens and pantries these boxes held salt, flour, baking soda, sugar, herbs and spices, and many survive in museum collections.

They rank among the objects most associated with the Shakers, and they reward a closer look. Almost every part of the box is the answer to a practical question.

The parts, in Shaker words

The Shaker Museum in Mount Lebanon, New York, uses the makers’ own names for the parts.

The rims are the bent sides of the box and of its lid. They were usually maple.

The heading is the flat board fitted inside each rim, the top of the lid and the bottom of the box. It was usually pine.

The swallowtails, often called fingers, are the narrow, arch-shaped tongues cut into the overlapping end of each rim. Boxes in the Shaker Museum’s collection carry two to four on the side and a single one on the lid.

The points are the small copper, iron or wooden wedges driven through the rim into the edge of the heading to hold it in place.

That is the whole object. Four kinds of part, two woods and a handful of metal tacks.

How a box was made

The museum describes the method as more straightforward than the result suggests. The rim was bent to shape with steam and a shaping form. While it was still on the form, copper tacks were driven through the swallowtails to hold the oval.

When the rim had dried, the heading was cut to fit inside it and secured with points. The museum notes that most of the thousands of boxes the Shakers made followed this formula.

The fingers are the signature of the box, and each one is held by a column of tacks. Copper was a sensible choice for those tacks, because copper does not rust. Makers often smoothed the tack heads so that nothing could catch under them and pull them loose, and on some boxes the file marks are still visible.

Made by the thousand

Craftsmen in any Shaker community might make boxes for their own use, but only some villages made them for sale. The Shaker Museum names Mount Lebanon, Canterbury, Sabbathday Lake, Alfred and Union Village.

Mount Lebanon led. Around 1850, Brother Isaac Newton Youngs recorded that the Church Family there first made boxes for sale around 1799, which makes them one of the earliest Shaker businesses. Between 1822 and 1865, the Church Family made more than 77,000 boxes, the Shaker Museum notes, and no other community matched that quantity. After the Civil War the work moved to the community’s Second Family, where it continued into the 1930s.

The craft outlasted the Mount Lebanon trade. Brother Delmer Wilson of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, who lived from 1873 to 1961, kept making oval boxes into the 1950s. The museum holds one he made for sale in the Shaker store at the age of 81, and another he reportedly made “out of odd pieces,” with a beech rim and a cherry lid.

Sizes that nest

The boxes came in more than a dozen sizes, from about two inches long to well over a foot, and many were made to nest one inside another. A full set stored in the footprint of its largest box.

At Mount Lebanon the sizes were numbered, and the numbering ran backward from what a modern shopper would expect. Oval boxes went from number 1, the largest, to number 11, the smallest. Chairs made in the same community went the other way, from 0 for the smallest to 7 for the largest.

In the mid-1870s, the community dropped the two largest and the two smallest box sizes and renumbered the remaining seven from 1 to 7. Elder Daniel Crosman, the Church Family’s main box maker at the time, had made at least eleven sizes, and he even made one he called a zero, larger than a number one.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds seven Shaker oval boxes of maple and pine, made sometime between 1800 and 1900. The smallest is about 6 inches long. The largest is about 13⅝ inches.

Telling one village from another

To a casual eye, every Shaker box looks alike. Collectors and curators read the details.

The direction of the fingers is one clue: the Shaker Museum notes that fingers pointing left are found most often on boxes from Alfred, Maine. Canterbury, New Hampshire, makers rounded the edges of their rims before bending them, which leaves a double hump where the two ends overlap. Mount Lebanon makers sanded the edge to a single round after the box was tacked.

Paint varied as well. Boxes were often colored in reds, oranges, greens, blues, browns and yellows, and many carry inscriptions: the names of makers and users, dates, and notes on what was kept inside.

Some boxes lived several lives. One Mount Lebanon box in the museum began as a lidded carrier with a bent handle fixed to its sides. Later, someone removed the handle and cut the box down, and the lid still fits snugly.

What the box held

The kitchen and the pantry were where many oval boxes worked. The Shaker Museum lists salt, flour, baking soda, sugar, herbs and spices among the things they held. In the sisters’ workrooms they kept sewing notions; in the brothers’ shops, tacks, nails, screws and dry paint pigments.

It is easy to see why a cook would want one. The box is light, it closes firmly, and its lid lifts off with one hand. A set of boxes sorted dry goods by size on a shelf without wasting space between them.

The Shakers organized whole rooms with the same thinking, down to the peg rails on their walls; what the Shakers knew about making things last covers the wider philosophy. The box sits inside a long American habit of keeping the kitchen in wood, which treenware traces back to the colonial hearth.

Using one today

Old and new oval boxes still do kitchen work well, as long as they stay dry. Keep one for coarse salt by the stove, for whole spices, tea or a baker’s stash of vanilla beans. Wipe it out with a dry or barely damp cloth and never soak it, because water can swell the thin wood and loosen its fit.

If you buy an antique, look at the fingers and the tacks first. Neat, evenly spaced tacks, a snug lid and a heading that still sits tight in its rim are the signs of a box that was made well and cared for.

The short version

A Shaker oval box is a thin maple rim bent with steam around a form, held by copper tacks through swallowtail fingers, and closed with a pine heading fixed by small points, with no glue. Mount Lebanon’s Church Family sold boxes from around 1799 and made more than 77,000 between 1822 and 1865. They nested in graduated sizes and held the dry goods of Shaker kitchens, and they still hold them.

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