Micajah Burnett
A combined research and poetry project on Micajah Burnett, a Shaker brother and the principal architect of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.
Burnett built in stone and timber that's still standing two centuries later — dwellings, meeting houses, a water system carved into limestone — without formal training, inside a community organized entirely around faith, work, and the belief that ordinary hands could make something meant to last.
This project sits with that: what it means to build something meant to outlast you, and what a place like Pleasant Hill still has to say about inheritance, history, and the quiet discipline of making things well.
Right now, it lives as an in-progress mix of research notes and poems — not a finished manuscript, not something ready to call done. It moves slowly, following whatever thread of place or history seems worth following that week.
This project is ongoing. Excerpts and additional project notes will be added here over time as the work develops.