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- W2912487868 abstract "Seized by the Jerks:Shakers, Spirit Possession, and the Great Revival Douglas L. Winiarski (bio) Nestled along a quiet country road near Greenville, Virginia, Clover Mount ranks among the earliest and best-preserved examples of vernacular architecture in the Shenandoah Valley. Built at the turn of the nineteenth century by Robert Tate, a prominent Scots-Irish planter, Revolutionary War veteran, slave owner, and Presbyterian elder [End Page 111] the handsome stone dwelling is best known for the decorative stenciling that adorns the interior walls. Less familiar to historians are the unusual religious commotions that took place at the Tate homestead during the Great Revival, the powerful series of Presbyterian sacramental festivals and Methodist camp meetings that spread across the western settlements from 1799 to 1805 and played a formative role in the development of early American evangelicalism. Nearly a century before the derisive phrase holy roller was coined to describe the ecstatic worship practices of independent Holiness-Pentecostal evangelicals in Appalachia, Tate and his children achieved widespread notoriety as Jerkers. Family members experienced repeated bouts of the Jerks: violent, involuntary convulsions in which the subjects' heads lashed backward and forward in quick succession, nearly touching the floor behind and before.1 Dramatic reports of the jerkers of Greenville drew the attention of three travelers who visited Clover Mount during the bitterly cold winter of 1804–5 (Figure I). The strangers called themselves believers, although the world's people knew them as Shaking Quakers, or Shakers. On New Year's Day 1805, Issachar Bates, John Meacham, and Benjamin Seth Youngs set off from New Lebanon, New York, on a 1,200-mile journey seeking like-minded religious radicals. One month later, Tate, his adult children, and their spouses sat down with the Shaker missionaries and patiently answered more than a dozen questions about the theological and experiential dimensions of their bodily fits. Several members of Tate's family were taken with the Jerks during the interview. While sitting on the chair, Youngs excitedly explained in a letter to the Shaker ministry in New Lebanon, their bodies would instantly appear stiff, the hands locked, the eyes closed, & the head jerked backwards over the chair, all as quick as lightning.2 For a brief period beginning in the summer of 1803, accounts of the religious revivals on the trans-Appalachian frontier were filled with news of the jerks. Sometimes these spasmodic shuddering gesticulations of [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure I. On January 31, 1805, Presbyterian elder Robert Tate welcomed Shaker missionaries John Meacham, Issachar Bates, and Benjamin Seth Youngs into his home at Clover Mount. Completed before 1803, the stone dwelling still stands in the Shenandoah Valley near Greenville, Virginia. Photograph taken in 1979 by Ann McCleary, file no. 07-606, negative no. 5516, Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission. Courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Richmond. neck and head operated like the hickups. At other times, jerkers bounced from place to place like a foot-ball or thrashed like a fish when thrown out of the water. Nothing in nature could beter represent this strange and unacountable operation, wrote one revival observer, than for one to goad another, alternately on every side, with a piece of red hot iron. The wonderous quickness with which the subjects' necks pivoted back and forth reminded another of a flail in the hands of a thresher. The jerks purportedly struck riders on horseback, men plowing in the fields, boys at their school desks, young girls drinking tea, families at supper, people in bed, musicians at play, and nursing mothers. They erupted without warning and without regard to age, class, gender, or physical constitution. Pious saints and notorious sinners were taken, seized, or attacked by the jerks, which were often propagated from person to person like a sympathetic contagion. Witnesses recounted stories of the jerkers' preternatural strength: diminutive women hurling two-hundred-pound men to the ground; floundering men leaving imprints of their knuckles on the massive timber walls of pioneer log churches. Congregants near Jonesborough, [End Page 113] Tennessee, even cut saplings in the woods surrounding their meetinghouse for use as jerking-posts to steady the afflicted.3 The..." @default.
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- W2912487868 date "2019-01-01" @default.
- W2912487868 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
- W2912487868 title "Seized by the Jerks: Shakers, Spirit Possession, and the Great Revival" @default.
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- W2912487868 doi "https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.76.1.0111" @default.
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