The Oneida Community: Utopia Turned Silver

In eighteen forty-eight, a Vermont theologian named John Humphrey Noyes led a small band of followers to central New York and founded one of the most audacious social experiments in American history. Noyes preached a theology called Perfectionism: the belief that humans could achieve a state of sinlessness in this life, and that true Christian community required sharing everything, including romantic partners.

The Oneida Community, as it came to be called, practiced what Noyes termed complex marriage, in which every adult member was considered married to every other adult member. Sexual relationships rotated through the group under Noyes's supervision. Children were raised communally by the whole group rather than by individual parents. Women cut their hair short, wore shorter skirts, and were expected to participate in intellectual and economic life alongside men. The community ran its own school, published its own newspaper, and managed its own finances.

To fund all of this, the Oneida Community became remarkably good at making things. They manufactured animal traps, eventually producing over two hundred thousand per year and becoming the largest trap-makers in America. They made silk thread. And in the late eighteen seventies, they began making silverware. That proved to be the lasting business.

Pressure from outside religious communities and internal disagreements forced the community to dissolve its communal arrangements in eighteen eighty. But the members incorporated a joint-stock company called Oneida Community Limited and kept the factory running. Over the next century, Oneida Limited grew into one of the largest silverware manufacturers in the world. The ninety-three-thousand-square-foot Mansion House where the community lived is a National Historic Landmark open for tours.