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Until the spring of 1981, our family knew absolutely nothing about Shakers, their way of life, their furniture, their oval boxes or the myriad of inventions and activities in which the Shakers were involved. That spring of 1981, our family visited the Old Fort Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana and on display was a reproduction of a #1 Shaker box. I was intrigued with the symmetry and beauty of the box. Since that time, our family has learned a great deal about the Shakers and their history through reading and visiting the Shaker village sites. I started making Shaker boxes shortly after that visit to the Old Fort Museum. By 1983, our four children were involved in making Shaker boxes and as a family we participated in Civil War Reenactments where we also sold our boxes. In 1995, I took an early retirement from my employment as a high school mathematics teacher and began to make and market Shaker boxes a bit more seriously. Currently my wife and I are the box makers as our four children have all graduated from college and have careers of their own. More recently, in 2001, my wife and I took a road trip to Alaska spending ten weeks traveling to, in and from Alaska. We stopped at nearly every museum on that trip and at the site of a Hudson Bay Trading post in British Columbia we found a most interesting museum. The Canadian government has reconstructed the trading post and has included in that reconstruction a museum with artifacts of the time the trading post was in existence...