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The Oneida Community

© Barbara Nicholson Bell

In my last article I wrote about the 'invented' village of Portmeirion, in North Wales. It began as the vision of a creative genius, Clough Williams-Ellis, and today is a successful tourist attraction and the inspiration for the Portmeirion china so coveted by brides and homemakers.

Other towns have begun in this manner, such as Williamsburg in Virginia, but in these cases the benefactor(s) were wealthy men with a desire to leave behind an historical legacy for the public's benefit.

In the case of the Oneida Community, however, one man's vision began as a religious concept, and perhaps a blueprint for a new world order. The Oneida community grew out of the "Society of Inquiry" established by John Humphrey Noyes and some of his disciples in Putney, VT, in 1841. As new recruits arrived, the society turned into a socialized community.

Noyes had experienced a religious conversion during a revival in 1831, when he was 20 years old. He then gave up law studies and attended Andover Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School. His acceptance and preaching of the doctrine of perfectionism, the idea that after conversion one was free of all sin, was considered too unorthodox, and he was denied ordination.

In 1847, at a time when revivalist belief in a new coming of Christ was at its height, Noyes proclaimed that the Spirit of Christ had earlier returned to Earth and had now entered into his group at Putney. This proclamation, together with the practice of Complex marriage, aroused the hostility of the surrounding community, and the group left Putney to found a new community at Oneida,in upstate New York in 1848.

The Community was founded on Noyes' theology of Perfectionism, a form of Christianity with two basic values: self-perfection and communalism. These ideals were translated into everyday life through shared property and work as well as Complex marriage - in which every woman was the wife of every man and every man was the husband of every woman. Noyes also believed that Socialism without religion was impossible and that the extended family system devised by him could dissolve selfishness and demonstrate the practicality of perfectionism on Earth. Monogamous marriage was abolished, and children were raised communally from their second year until age 12.

This child care system freed the women as well as the men to take part in the Community's manufacturing of animal traps, chains, silk items, and silver knives, forks, and spoons. The Oneida Community soon became known not only for the unconventional lifestyle of its members, but also for the quality of its goods. The Newhouse trap invented by a founding

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