When this story took place—when these people were making footprints in the Richland dirt—America was a young nation and it still dreamed the perfect dreams of youth. It was a fresh land in a New World and anything seemed possible. History was ripe for adventure and experimentation.
The folks who came to these North Central Ohio hills when it was still covered with forest had no difficulty imagining the new country turning into an ideal society sprouting from the revolutionary roots of radical liberty and equality.
Those decades of the 1820s and ’30s are referenced in history books as a Great Awakening because a lot of this creative enthusiasm was focused in religious fervor. Within the span of just a few decades, a number of American religions were born—some of which still exist in our own time.
Not all of them made it, however.
There was one particular colony of believers in Richland County who entered into the spirit of religious and community experimentation with great excitement to establish their own version of perfect society in the United States.
The only remnants of this great American invention are found in a cemetery not far west of Bellville.
German Americans
These Richland pioneers were named Shafer and they came here from Germany where they had endured endless generations of wars over fealty to kingdoms and principalities. As new Americans, they hoped much higher than that: for a society of kindness and prosperity, for children who would assume a radically reimagined kind of life where hard work would feed their own family and not their King.
The first of these pioneers was Adam, appropriately enough—Adam Shafer—and when he walked the rolling hills west of Bellville he dreamed of a renewed humanity wholly dedicated to principles older than the U.S. Constitution, older than Germany, older than all the Christian nations, hearkening clear back to the earliest stirrings of reverence in the Holy Land.
He envisioned his community devoted to peace, which, in the language of the early Holy Lands is pronounced, “Salaam,” and “Shalom,” so when he gathered his clan around to give thanks for their harvest, he named their lands with another variation of that word: the Valley of Salem.
Salem, as you may observe, is contained within Jerusalem, and it was with the full expectation of planting a new holy land in Richland County that the relatives and friends of Adam Shafer drove their plows into the soil of Jefferson and Perry Townships.
The kind of harmony and grace he laid the groundwork for would be known in later generations of historians as a Utopian Community.
On that particular segment of the timeline in American history, there were a number of similarly inspired communal endeavors. That was when the Shakers moved to the frontier, when New Harmony took root, as well as the Zoar village of Separatists, and the founding of the Mormons.
It spawned a whole chapter of religious freedom and independence, and, in retrospect, it seems perfectly natural that the Richland soil would sprout its own planting of Utopian organization. Or, rather, un-organization because the informing minds behind Salem very specifically designed their commune to be utterly without hierarchy.
Everyone was equal.
Women shouldered their labors and voiced their preferences with no less weight than their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers.
This was almost a hundred years before the rest of American women got the vote, and nearly two generations before Africans were considered Americans.
Early American Enthusiasm
If they had a specific name for their brand of religion it did not survive the end of their commune.
They built a church in the valley, and they believed in precepts that were Christian, but they recognized that commonly practiced religions fell far short of the love they intended.
They believed in hard work and they believed in the profit of their labors. The combined acreage of the many Salem families brought forth crops so prodigious that when the railroad came to Jefferson Township they had their own Shafer Siding built nearby for loading their produce off to market.
The tremendous providence of their produce was not an end in itself, however, it was maintained in order to support a collective of families organized in “an effort to address a variety of social questions—chief among them anti-slavery, temperance, women’s rights, and ‘sabbatarianism,’ which was the orientation of their entire lives around a reverence for the Sabbath Day.
Creating a society in which, “the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color, or condition, sect or religion.”
They gathered together to form “a better and purer form of society.”
With earnest solemnity, they bound themselves to social justice by assisting fugitive slaves towards freedom, and though the actual felony work of moving wagons north loaded with refugees fell to only one particular family, the whole valley was committed to making this holy work possible.
The rivers augmented in green are the Cedar Fork flowing into the Clear Fork of the Mohican River.
Also specified in red is the Mansfield, Sandusky & Newark Railroad (later the B&O), with the parallel Shafer Siding tracks where railroad cars could be paused for loading.
Shafer Siding
The oldest members of the collective spoke very little English, so it is to the younger generation that we owe everything we know about the Salem experiment. One of them kept an account book, and filled some of the back pages of the bound volume as a sporadic diary.
By context we know this writer was a woman, she wrote English like an American, and she signed the book only once on the first page as A. Shafer.
The first forty pages give us some sense of what the Salem farmers were loading into the railroad cars at Shafer Siding. There were pigs, cows, and sheep; as well as pumpkins, potatoes, and a terrific volume of hay. Vast tonnage of hay. Enough hay to build a hay scale next to the tracks, though in the records hay was measured in ‘loads.’
Within the valley they built a grist mill powered by the waters of the Cedar Fork, and were able in this way to process ‘corn to be crushed and rye to be ground,’ shipped off by rail and traded for ‘cholera medicine.’
Many of the agricultural notations in the book give their 1840s labors a timeless immediacy, like ‘finished picking stone off field 2,’ and ‘planting corn in number 3.’
Ms. Shafer noted that they paid quite a bit to have a cast iron bell shipped to the Valley—for calling the community together—and they took exceptional effort to procure the bell from Germany, perhaps from the village they left behind.
Of all the many financial entries in her pages of numbers, this is the only item she decided to amplify with words and sentiment within the confines of accounting columns. It is almost like she knew she was speaking to history because otherwise there would be no explanation due.
The bell, she wrote, never arrived, to their mounting dismay, and the community concluded they had been simply ripped off. What came of their disappointment, though, is probably the best part of this whole story.
They decided, as a group, to commission their bell cast at a foundry in Bellville. This new resolve became clearly evident to them, she wrote, one day during a session of group prayer.
As a revelation to their united spirit, they suddenly realized that any bell made in Germany could never have rung true to their communal will. And that only a bell cast in their New World could summon them to a wholly ‘righteous meeting of hearts’ in their prayer. And how uniquely appropriate that it be created in an American village named Bell-ville.
Unaccountably
As to the diary section of A. Shafer’s pages of pencil notations, it makes pretty dull reading, as is true of almost everyone on the planet both then and now.
However, from her diary it is easy to glean a few fundamental aspects of their communal practices based in their beliefs:
They did absolutely no work on the Sabbath, but gave themselves over entirely to ‘joy in the Lord,’ which meant ‘acts of worship’ that included boating, picnics, singing, and dancing, as well as other forms of ‘playing’ which entailed dramatic theatrical readings and performances. She writes of ‘fair play,’ and ‘barn songs,’ and greatly anticipates ‘camp weather’ when they will be holding their meetings outdoors.
From the sole drawing in the document it is easy to determine their favorite holiday. Ordinarily you might expect it would be Christmas or Easter, but the folks of Salem were brand new Americans and they absolutely reveled in their freedom on Independence Day.
Peaceable Kingdom
There is one page in the volume where A. Shafer seems, once again, to be addressing herself to the annals of Richland County and American history.
The text doesn’t appear to have come from any specific conversation or event in the Valley, and, in fact, seems almost in another handwriting altogether.
Therein is set down what appears to be a code of behaviors, like a guideline of best practices based on their shared beliefs. If you’ve read Benjamin Franklin’s famous list of thirteen virtues, you’ve seen almost everything on the program, including Frugality, Temperance, Industry, and Humility.
But there is one particular entry which rises above the rest as a particularly poignant aspiration in the true Spirit of Salem:
‘Bring Peace to everything we do—every potato pulled from the ground, every log put on the fire, every word spoken aloud, every step taken down the lane.’
With this one small parcel, the whole of the Salem experiment can be interpreted: A German language Catechism bookmarked with an English language print from the American Sunday School Union, illustrating a quintessential verse of Isaiah about the Peaceable Kingdom.
Eluding History
As indicated by notations in the Shafer Account Book, it appears that the Salem collective existed from approximately 1822 -1859. What brought about its dissolution is not part of the narrative in the Shafer notes, but there are some hard facts in County records that indicate a division took place in the Valley.
Graham’s History says that the Salem church was shared harmoniously for years with another congregation of neighbors. But then, in 1860—the year when America split in two—the Salem Valley experienced its own House Divided and suddenly needed to separate. That was when one of the congregations put up their own church house made of brick. It was built just yards away from the original church structure, almost like a spite fence.
The new and revised church bore a marble plaque over the twin doors that read Evangelical Lutheran Church.
There is one particularly hard fact embodied in this very building by which to make an educated guess as to a source of their discontent. The new replacement church had two front doors—which in traditional Early American practice meant one particular thing: men used one door, women used the other. This would appear to be a clear rebuke in brick against the policy of gender equality practiced by the Salem Collective.
Adam Shafer left this world in 1858, and his body was laid to rest in the valley of peace. Subsequently, and true to form for most of these early American utopian communities, once the visionary passed away, the vision faded to obscurity and the community lost its purpose.
Because of that, the Salem collective is considered historically a failed experiment.
But, history is only measured in the past, and in the eternal present of each person there who enjoyed the daily prosperity of their special community, it certainly succeeded gloriously, if A. Shafer can speak for them all.
And isn’t it wonderful that they even wanted to try so diligently to make a more perfect world.
There was, indeed, a German Reformed movement in the U.S. at the time, but it was unrelated to this settlement of Germans in southern Richland County.
There is no way to know whether the writer of these paragraphs was mistaken, misled, or intentionally dismissive of the Salem Collective, considering how similar Utopian endeavors in America were attacked, derided, and maligned by mainstream Christian organizations and popular media.
Descendants of the group are still circumspect about speaking of it today.
Apparently the steeple is being stored inside along with the roof.
Thank You!
I would never have heard of the Salem Valley experiment if left solely to historical archives. A friend, who has chosen to remain anonymous, brought me the Shafer Memorandum Book, the Salem Sunday School material along with some family lore that faintly resounds like echoes fading in the hills of the Cedar Fork. I feel honored to be given a glimpse into that inspired and inspiring Early American world.
Post Script:
Yesterday I determined to photograph the confluence where the Cedar Fork empties into the Clear Fork at the head of the Salem Valley, and according to the maps and Google aerials, it is a short walk through a couple of modest fields.
From ground level, however, it turned out one of those fields was an impenetrable prairie grown way over my head. I strolled down to the bridge on Rt. 97 to see if it would be possible to follow along the river bank, but that was far worse.
The easiest route, in the end, is right down the middle of the river.
Most of it was barely over my socks, but what was most amazing was that even where it deepened to waist depth I could see every pebble and bluegill on the bottom. Whoever named this Fork of the Mohican must have had the same experience, because it is the clearest river I’ve ever been in.
Richland County History 