Wayland-Smith writes that Noyes’ journal, written as a Dartmouth student in 1829, “provides glimpses of a teenager struggling with paralysing shyness in his relations to the opposite sex. When Noyes was born in 1811, his mother Polly prayed that he might become a “minister of the everlasting gospel”. Wayland-Smith documents how, in an event known as “the burning”, members of the family authorised the destruction of the community’s records, in order to prevent the potentially embarrassing revelations from falling into the hands of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who wanted to study how complex marriage had worked. By the 1940s, Oneida had become among the most prestigious brands of silverware and cutlery, and its owners were mortified that the public might find out about the company’s free love beginnings. In the 1840s, Noyes and his followers set up the Oneida Reserve, buying land that had been confiscated from Native Americans, determined to be able to practise their communistic Christianity (in which claiming a single person as one’s own was seen as antithetical to the group’s wellbeing). Oneida, which is located 80 miles to the east, provided a home for Noyes’s nascent Society of Inquiry when its members fled from Putney, Vermont in the 1840s after Noyes’ doctrine of “complex marriage” offended the local townspeople.Įllen Wayland-Smith is a descendant of members of the Oneida community, and in her book she details the travails of her ancestors. The region had already surrendered its secrets to the young Joseph Smith when he discovered the gold books of the angel Moroni buried in a drumlin near Palmyra, and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The exception was the Oneida community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes, in the Leatherstocking region of central New York state. All of these efforts failed fairly quickly.

Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), Robert Owen and a group of transcendentalists all tried their hands at creating separate communities of peace and understanding. I n 19th-century America, a number of utopian communities, oblivious to the defeatist etymology of the word utopia (Greek for “not” plus “place”, or “no-place”), were established, mostly throughout the north-east.

Oneida by Ellen Wayland-Smith