He was a prolific scribe, correspondent, and diarist who documented the history of the New Lebanon, New York Church Family of Shakers from 1815 to 1865.
Children were indentured to learn trades, as well, and that often meant living as an apprentice with the family of a master craftsman, rather than with kin.
[1] At age thirteen, Youngs was sent from Watervliet to the New Lebanon, New York Shaker village, where he became an apprentice to tailors David Slosson and Rufus Bishop.
He was rebellious and sexually tempted, but he learned humility, resisted temptation, conquered his lust, and became a role model to younger Shakers.
[3] Shakers had a strong work ethic and each Believer's workday was supposed to be filled with productive activity every waking moment.
He taught the New Lebanon Church Family boys' school, and spent part of every winter tailoring and training new apprentices.
He helped build the new meeting house for the New Lebanon Church Family, wrote poems and a hymn for its dedication, and repaired its tin roof.
He built furniture, transcribed hymnals by hand, helped build the brethren's new workshop, and attended camp meetings, repaired the village's waterworks, built an arch in the sisters' weave shop, ran social meetings for the Children's Order, worked on the Church Family dwelling, turned more than a thousand clothespins on a lathe, and laid a new floor in the dairy.
In 1834, he toured the Shaker societies in Ohio and Kentucky, kept a journal of the trip, and made maps of the villages he visited.
He was a tailor, mechanic, and inventor: of a metronome, tonometer, leveling instrument, and five-pointed pen for drawing music staffs.
In it, he covered a wide variety of topics, including equality of the sexes, worship, building construction, farming practices, brethren's trades, food, dress, women's work, music, education, avoidance of militia service and other conflicts with the state, donations, and casualties.
Giles Avery, one of his former students, wrote: "Dear Br Isaac N. Youngs, now exceedingly demented, jumped out of a fourth story window, at the south end of the great central house; onto the walk below, he lived only about 2 hours, thereafter."