The founders of Union Village were evidently men who did their work
thoroughly; the dwellings and houses they built early in the century,
all of brick, have a satisfactory solidity, and are not without the
homely charm which good work and plain outlines give to any building.
Two of these old houses in the Church Family are now used as the boys'
and the girls' houses, and are uncommonly good specimens of early
Western architecture. The whole village is a pattern of neatness, with
flagged walks and pleasant grassy court-yards and shade-trees; but I
noticed here and there a slackness in repairs which seemed to show the
want of a deacon's sharp eyes.
_North Union._
The North Union Shaker Society lies eight miles northeast from
Cleveland. It was founded in 1822, in what was then a thickly timbered
wilderness, and the people lived for some years in log cabins. The
society was most numerous about 1840, when it contained two hundred
members. It is now divided into three families, having one hundred and
two persons, of whom seventeen are children and youth under twenty-one.
Of these last, six are boys and eleven girls. Of the adult members,
forty-four are women and forty-one men. Their numbers have of late
increased, but there was a gradual diminution for fifteen years before
that.
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