Ned Quist | Harvard Historical Society

A retired academic librarian, Ned is a researcher specializing in the history of the Harvard Shaker Village.

Ned is a retired academic librarian who spent his career as a music librarian and library administrator at Johns Hopkins and Brown University.

He has collected a large number of Shaker Village photographs, maps, and illustrations from many sources across the country and has searched the journals kept by the Harvard Shakers to document the history of the buildings, roads, ponds, and the Shaker Mill. He is the author of published articles on the Harvard Shakers and a builder of Shaker furniture.

The Harvard Shakers and Their Cultural Landscape

Book by Ned Quist

Available for purchase from our Museum Shop

The most extensive story so far of the Harvard Shakers, in a beautiful book by Ned Quist. The book presents a collection of images old and new, quotes from the Shakers’ own journals, many historic maps, and photographs of the buildings, including those that remain and those that are now gone. This book gives a complete timeline and glimpses into the Shakers’ own world in their own words.

Talks by Ned Quist

The Harvard Shakers, their barns and the worst agricultural land in Harvard

Robert C. Anderson in his “Directions of a Town” wrote: “The first task of the Shakers at Harvard in their…