Appalachian Figures
Micajah Burnett is usually remembered as the Shaker architect whose limestone houses and twin spiral staircases still surprise visitors at Pleasant Hill in Mercer County. He is less often remembered as a frontier boy from Wayne County, growing up on the edge of the Appalachian plateau before he ever laid out a village street or calculated a water system. Reconnecting him to that Wayne County background shows how a family from the Virginia backcountry carried their skills, kin ties, and imagination into one of the most ambitious communal experiments in Kentucky history.
From Patrick County roads to the Wayne County frontier
Most modern reference works agree that Micajah was born in Patrick County, Virginia, on 13 May 1791, the eldest child of Jeremiah and Elizabeth (Small) Burnett.
By the mid 1790s that young family had crossed into Kentucky. Genealogist Ray E. Blevins, in a study pointedly titled Burnetts from Virginia to Wayne County, Kentucky, follows several branches of the Burnett kin network out of Lunenburg and Patrick counties and into newly formed Wayne County, documenting them through tax lists and early county deeds.
Online trees and cemetery records help to pin down the family’s location on the Cumberland frontier. Profiles for Micajah’s younger brother Zachariah and sister Charity list their birthplace as Wayne County, Kentucky, which implies that the family was settled there by the turn of the nineteenth century. Later genealogical work on the Upshaw and Burnett families traces the same movement from Patrick County into Wayne County, treating Jeremiah Burnett as part of a broader migration path that linked the Blue Ridge to the upper Cumberland.
Wayne County itself had only just been carved out of Pulaski and Cumberland counties in 1800. It was a place of steep hollows and river bends, but also of new county seats, mills, and road projects, all recorded in the deed books and court minutes that Blevins and later transcribers mined for Burnett references. In that environment a boy like Micajah would have known log houses and rough clearings, but also surveyors’ chains, gristmills, and the constant arithmetic of land, labor, and distance. Those skills would matter later.
A Wayne County family joins the Shakers
According to Shaker reference works and the modern Shaker Village site, Jeremiah and Elizabeth Burnett converted to Shakerism in the first decade of the nineteenth century and moved their family from Wayne County to the new Shaker community at Pleasant Hill near Harrodsburg. The National Park Service summary of Pleasant Hill notes that Burnett and his parents arrived when he was seventeen, around 1808 or 1809, just as the community was gathering strength in the wake of the Great Revival.
Pleasant Hill’s earliest buildings resembled those of New England Shaker villages, facing west into the prevailing winds. The Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia entry suggests that an 1809 stone house at the crossroads may even have been an early design by the young Burnett, though it lacks the refinement of his later work. If so, that would place a Wayne County teenager from the Appalachian borderlands among the Shakers’ first resident builders in Kentucky.
Reorienting a village
By his early twenties Micajah Burnett had become something more than a handy carpenter. Modern Shaker scholarship credits him with rethinking the entire plan of Pleasant Hill. Instead of continuing the original north–south orientation, he proposed turning the principal buildings to face west, aligning them along an east–west road that better caught the light and the prevailing breeze.
Along that road he designed and supervised a sequence of large dwelling houses for the East, West, and Centre “families.” The East and West Family brick dwellings of the late 1810s and early 1820s were already sophisticated works, but the Centre Family Dwelling that went up between 1824 and 1834 became the masterpiece.
The Centre Family dwelling contained nearly twenty five thousand square feet of space, enough for as many as eighty Shakers. It was built entirely of white limestone quarried from the palisades of the Kentucky River below the village, with carefully regular windows, paired entrances for brothers and sisters, and broad rooms that avoided unnecessary structural clutter. A modern interpretive guide produced by Shaker Village notes that the building’s interior contained bedrooms, infirmary, kitchens, a cellar with storage rooms, and a great meeting room that could absorb the daily routine of an entire Shaker “family.”
Burnett also designed the 1820 meeting house at the center of the village. Both the NPS summary and the Archipedia entry emphasize that its timber frame and limestone foundations were calculated to withstand the pounding and vibration of Shaker worship while leaving the interior free of central posts. In other words, the building was engineered specifically for a style of worship that outsiders remembered for its shouting, stomping, and shaking.
Water, engineering, and the work of daily life
The most quietly revolutionary part of Burnett’s work may have been his handling of water. During the early 1830s he directed the construction of a village water system that several historians describe as among the earliest public waterworks west of the Allegheny Mountains.
Archipedia notes that in 1833 Burnett designed a freestanding cistern built around a large cypress tank, raised on a limestone base and enclosed in a clapboard water house. A horse powered pump drove water up from springs near the Kentucky River to that reservoir, which then fed water by gravity to the kitchens and wash houses. The interpretive guide used at Pleasant Hill today still highlights the water house as a key example of Shaker ingenuity and lists it among the early nineteenth century buildings that structured village life.
Burnett’s expertise did not go unnoticed by other Shaker communities. A history of the South Union waterworks notes that Shakers there consulted him in 1837 when they established their own system, explicitly crediting the Pleasant Hill engineer for his advice.
This was not abstract theory. Water, laundry, and preserves work defined much of the daily labor at Pleasant Hill, and Burnett’s buildings made that work more efficient. His wash houses, preserve shops, and baths appear repeatedly in community guides and architectural surveys, a reminder that his engineering talent was always focused on routine tasks such as cleaning clothes, boiling fruit, and heating water.
“Principal architect of this village”
What did the Shakers themselves think of this Wayne County transplant who redesigned their settlement?
In 1879 the Shaker Ministry at Pleasant Hill wrote a short assessment of Burnett in their own journal. That entry, quoted by M. R. Chemotti in a study of Pleasant Hill architecture, describes him as “the principal architect of this village” and praises him as an accomplished civil engineer. This is as close as we can get to an official Shaker verdict on his career, and it comes from the people who worshipped in his meeting house and slept in his dwellings.
Modern interpreters at Shaker Village echo that language. A blog series on “Pleasant Hill Personalities” repeats the description of Burnett as principal architect and notes that he was remembered for “superior intellect” as well as physical stamina. That stamina showed up not only in the buildings he left behind but also in the distances he was willing to travel on the Society’s business.
Out on the road with the Shaker trustee
Burnett did not spend his entire life at a drafting table. Pleasant Hill’s journals and later reminiscences make clear that he served as one of the village trustees, responsible for handling business with the outside world. In that role he carried Shaker products into the markets of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and brought back raw materials, tools, and information.
One journal of community life, kept by James L. Ballance and now transcribed by the Filson Historical Society, introduces itself as a record of deaths, farming, weather, and “the beginning or finishing of any important business.” Among the routine entries about frost and sheep shearing is a line from the early 1860s noting that “Micajah Burnett set out for St Liouis with garden seeds” while another brother left the same day for Cincinnati.
Another set of Shaker records, described in the Filson catalog as a “temporal journal” probably kept by Micajah’s brother Zachariah, covers the years from 1853 to 1864 and continues the pattern of recording daily work, travel, and deaths in the village. A transcribed portion of Zachariah’s journal preserved by Bullitt County historians includes an 1849 entry where he notes that “M. Burnett started to Bullitt County Furnace with some furnace patterns to have some casting done” and later that Burnett returned home with the iron castings in hand.
Village interpreters like to point out that Burnett was still taking such trips in his late seventies, carrying Shaker seeds and other goods as far as New Orleans. In those journeys we can glimpse the same frontier mobility that had carried his family from Virginia to Wayne County a lifetime earlier, now repurposed for a celibate religious community that depended on steady contact with the wider world.
Illness, death, and memory in the journals
Burnett’s last months appear in Pleasant Hill’s records with the same spare clarity that marks the rest of the community’s writing.
A Find a Grave memorial for Micajah, which draws on Pleasant Hill journals, notes that an entry from December 1878 recorded him as “dangerously ill,” followed by a January 1879 note that he “breathed his last” a little after nine in the evening on 10 January. Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts preserves a short obituary for him in its research library, reproduced decades later in a Shaker calendar and cataloged simply as “Obituary of Micajah Burnett, 87, who died 10 January 1879.”
Together with the ministerial praise quoted by Chemotti, these brief notices suggest that Pleasant Hill Shakers saw Burnett not only as a builder of stone and timber but also as a trusted leader whose long service deserved to be remembered.
Wayne County roots and Appalachian legacies
Although Burnett’s most visible work stands today in Mercer County, his story begins in the Appalachian borderlands. Genealogical studies of the Burnetts show how families from Patrick County followed new roads toward the Cumberland, settling in Wayne County and appearing in deeds, marriage bonds, and cemetery lists throughout the early nineteenth century.
From that world of small farms and courthouse squares came a boy who would spend nearly seven decades among the Shakers. At Pleasant Hill he helped to create a carefully ordered landscape of limestone dwellings, workshops, and fences that still feels astonishingly modern. The National Park Service notes that he worked within Shaker building rules and drew on Federal style influences, yet always tried to maximize open space and minimize visible supports, producing interiors that seem to float in the light.
Architectural historians such as Clay Lancaster and Cristina Carbone have argued that no other single figure shaped the built environment of a western Shaker village as strongly as Burnett shaped Pleasant Hill. Travel writers still single out his twin spiral staircases in the Trustees’ Office, twisting upward like wooden shells, as some of the most photographed features of Shaker architecture anywhere.
For Appalachian history, Burnett’s life offers a reminder that the region’s story does not stop at its religious or county lines. A family who once appears in Wayne County tax lists as frontier settlers also shows up in Shaker membership rolls, waterworks records, and architectural surveys. The same skills that let a boy grow up on the Kentucky frontier made it possible for an adult to calculate staircases, cisterns, and village streets in a communal utopia.
Seen from Wayne County, the Shaker buildings at Pleasant Hill are not just curiosities in the Bluegrass. They are part of a larger Appalachian story about movement, imagination, and the many ways people from the mountain borderlands tried to build better worlds.
Sources and further reading
Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, Records, 1815–1917. “A Journal or Record of events kept by James L. Ballance,” transcription held by the Filson Historical Society, Louisville.The Filson Historical Society+1
Shakers, Pleasant Hill Community, Records, 1815–1917. Volume described as a temporal journal probably kept by Zachariah Burnett, 1853–1864, Filson Historical Society catalog entry.The Filson Historical Society
Shaker Ministry and community journals at Pleasant Hill, as quoted in M. R. Chemotti, “Outside Sources for Shaker Building at Pleasant Hill,” Kentucky Review.UKnowledge
“A Guide to the Historic Structures,” Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, site interpretive booklet.Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Cristina Carbone, “Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill,” SAH Archipedia, Society of Architectural Historians.SAH ARCHIPEDIA
“Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill,” National Park Service, National Historic Landmark District summary.National Park Service
“Pleasant Hill Personalities,” and related posts on the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill blog.Village@work+1
Ray E. Blevins, Burnetts from Virginia to Wayne County, Kentucky (Overmountain Press, 1986), as described in library and catalog records.catalog.dallaslibrary.org+1
Upshaw Family genealogy articles connecting Patrick County, Virginia, Burnetts to Wayne County, Kentucky descendants.upshaw.org
“Pleasant Hill Kentucky Waterworks” and “South Union Kentucky Waterworks,” WaterworksHistory.us.Waterworks History+1
Stephen J. Paterwic, The A to Z of the Shakers; Wikipedia and Completely Kentucky entries for “Micajah Burnett,” summarizing modern scholarship on his life.Wikipedia+1
Find a Grave memorial and Hancock Shaker Village library catalog entries for the death and obituary of Micajah Burnett.Find A Grave+1