[RightWhale]

Indeed they did. It's easy to see why they didn't get fresh recruits in huge numbers. Still, they lasted many years and weren't isolated in just one community. They never got up to the ideal [for that time] 2,500 members in one economic community. Socialists, of course, watched Shakers closely and took their continued existence as proof that the communitarian approach would work. Socialism, Biblical Communism even, born and practiced in America, and long before Marx.

[f.Christian]

Funny ... in the springtime --- 'winter' quakers would flew the coop !