13 Main Rd, Tyringham, MA 01264

THE 1854 SHAKER SEED HOUSE is significant as the center piece of Tyringham Valley Shakers most successful enterprise. One hundred twelve years later the same home used for sorting & packing seeds became home to the Jean Brown Archives. SHAKER SEED HOUSE became a weekend Mecca for artists & scholars from around the world. There are only 20 original Shaker homes currently in private hands. The Shaker Seed House is in the western part of Massachusetts in an area called the Berkshire Hills. Its precise locale, Tyringham, is a small village settled in 1735 after it was purchased from the Stockbridge Indians. Nearly forty years later, the first group of Shakers, a persecuted religious group from England, arrived in America. They established several settlements in Western Massachusetts, with the major ones located in the Berkshire Hills. When they started to develop a settlement in Tyringham in 1783, they met with much hostility and persecution. After several years, the townspeople finally accepted the local Shakers, who then began building two self-sustaining exclusive settlements, one called the Church Family and the other about half a mile away, named the North Family. In 1826 with the acquisition of 100 acres, the Church Family Shakers developed the property further, adding several buildings including mills, to a pre-existing large red barn (1792) and a four-story hou