Winterthur has one of the finest libraries anywhere on the Shaker religious sect. Largely donated by the Andrews family—Edward Deming and Faith Andrews were pioneer Shaker scholars and collectors beginning in the 1920s—the collection holds thousands of printed items, manuscripts, and photographs by and about the Shakers. Even so, it has no manuscripts chronicling the activities of the first Shakers before they established their initial village in the late 1770s.
