Villagers lived as a collective religious colony for 15 years, from 1846 to 1861, tilling the soil, tending their animals, and building their settlement with handmade bricks. A large number of Shakers from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky joined the community, as did thirty converts from Hopedale, Massachusetts. When a fifth group of more than four hundred immigrants from Sweden arrived in 1847, the commune's population reached 700, but the subsequent severe winter led to food shortages and illness, and about 200 people left to join a nearby Methodist community, using personal wealth they had hidden in order to buy land. Some local pioneers were amazed by their lifestyle and the relative success that it generated, since after 1847 the community grew both cash crops and food for themselves, as well as manufactured carpet for sale (production would peak in 1857 at 150,000 yards before the new Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad would bring cheaper manufactured goods from Chicago and the east). Although Jansson had ordered celibacy during the lean years, in 1848, the year the community built the (still-standing) Colony Church, Jansson lifted the ban and conducted mass marriage ceremonies, arranging the marriages 83 of 102 couples married between 1848 and 1853.