Oneida Limited is a renown dining, flatware, and cookware company, with products sold across the country. But this company had a very unique beginning. They were founded in Central New York 135 years ago by a utopian commune. For this week's Your Hometown, our Cara Thomas tells us what made the Oneida Community the most radically successful commune in the area.
ONEIDA, N.Y. -- Since the 1800s, the Oneida brand has graced many families' dining room tables.
"Somewhere around half of the flatware that was sold in America was Oneida flatware," said Paul Gebhardt, the senior VP of Design for Oneida Ltd.
Now the company one of the world's leading stainless steel flatware providers. But for the Oneida Community, the religious commune which founded the company, success and profit were never their goal.
"This was a group that was a always good at making money but never at the expense of the world," said Tony Wonderley, curator for the Oneida Community Mansion House Museum.
In 1848, a man named John Humphrey Noyes experienced a second awakening and claimed to be divinely inspired by God. He was a perfectionist and believed sin could be defeated by complete selflessness.
Noyes and 250 of his followers formed the Oneida Community where they lived in a mansion, a place they believed was their very own heaven on earth.
"Heaven to them was everyone lives as 1 family, sharing everything, all possessions, all love, all private property," said Wonderley.
But not even this “utopia” could survive without a revenue stream. Their first business was agricultural, selling fruits, vegetables and jellies.
But they quickly realized, their true niche was in manufacturing and began producing metal animal traps.
Wonderley said, "By the early 1860s, these guys were turning out over 200,000 traps a year and they were the biggest trap makers in America."
This business made the community quite profitable and funded additional businesses, creating silk thread and flatware.
"No one needed another tabletop company in Upstate New York, that's for sure. There were plenty of competitors that were at the top of their game and I think the management at Oneida knew that at the time. So they hired the, a) the best design talent they could and b) the best branding people they could," said Gebhardt.
These advertising techniques helped the company survive economic downturns and the World Wars.
Oneida Limited had already been transformed into a joint stock company in 1879 and up until the 1920s, descendants of the original Oneidans owned nearly 90 percent of the stocks.
"Really by about 1950 is really when the last of the children born in the Oneida community really begin passing away and the company is really no longer in this family that used to be Oneida Community," said Wonderley.
Oneida Limited continues to live on today, selling tableware to not only households but cruise lines, hotels and restaurants.
Noyes' utopian community was one of the longest lasting communes in the area. The mansion where they lived is now a museum filled with the community's history.