Oneida Community, New York
The Oneida Community was founded by John Noyes, a Perfectionist Christian. Perfectionism in this sense refers to the perfection of the soul, free of all sin, which occurred at the second coming of Jesus Christ, believed by Noyes and other followers of the sect to have happened in 70 AD. Perfectionists at Oneida believed all property to be communal and practiced complex marriage, in which multiple partners are all married to each other and live together.
The Oneida Community practiced free love, to the point that exclusive relationships were disapproved of, and the children which were produced by such a system were to be raised communally. Mutual criticism was another common practice, in which a member was subjected to a critique of their perceived faults by other members of the community publicly.
In the late 1860s the community introduced an experiment in selective breeding, requiring those who wished to procreate to be matched to a suitable mate by a committee. Fifty-eight children were born through this process, Noyes was the father of nine of them. Children in the Oneida Community were weaned from their mother around the age of one and placed into the Children’s wing, where they were raised communally, with visitation by their biological parents closely monitored.
The community eventually numbered more than 300 members. Oneida maintained an agricultural operation, both for sustenance and for profit, and secondary manufacturing of items such as leather goods, traps, lightweight furniture, and eventually silverware and flatware. The businesses were successful to the point that by 1870 Oneida was employing more than 200 outside workers, and was the largest employer in the region.
Internal pressures occurred when Noyes was unable to transfer control to his agnostic son, and external pressures from other religious groups forced Oneida to make several changes, including the abandonment of complex marriage. Noyes fled the country when threatened with statutory rape charges. When the community broke apart some of its members formed a joint-stock company called Oneida Community Limited to continue manufacturing operations. Today it is known as Oneida Limited, still a major cutlery producer, although manufacturing is now done overseas.