Shaker membership reached several thousand across as many as nineteen communities at its mid-nineteenth century peak, concentrated in New England and extending west into Ohio and Kentucky, communities that were materially self-sufficient, commercially successful, sold seeds and furniture prized for their plain craftsmanship, and were visited by curious outsiders as a working example of a functioning celibate utopian society. Membership required conversion rather than birth, since children were not born into the community, and the movement's later decline followed directly from that structural fact once the surrounding culture's enthusiasm for joining a celibate communal life faded after the Civil War era.
Numbers fell steadily from the later nineteenth century onward as communities closed one after another and consolidated their remaining members, until a single community, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, remains active today, continuing to accept new members under the same theology and governance the movement held from its founding. Shaker material culture, particularly its furniture, built plain and functional on the theological principle that beauty rests in usefulness rather than ornament, continues to be collected, studied and reproduced today by museums and craftspeople well beyond any specifically religious interest in the community itself, an afterlife the movement's own membership numbers alone would not predict.