Q: What Is the Connection Between a Serial Polygamist and Famous Flatware?

A: As a theology student at Yale, John Humphrey Noyes (born in 1811) proudly declared himself sin free and in a state of perfection. Not surprisingly, this perfect specimen was denied a license to preach, so he organized fellow perfectionists into a “Bible Communist” community in Putney, Vermont.

There Noyes taught a doctrine of free love. In 1846 the Putney group adopted what their leader called “complex marriage,” such that all the women were “married” to all the men and vice versa. (And you think your marriage has complications!?)

Arrested for adultery, Noyes jumped bail and fled to New York, where he founded a new community in Oneida. There, the Oneida Community practiced complex marriage up until 1879, when Noyes finally gave in to pressure from outside moralists and abandoned the practice. As for Oneida, once an agricultural-religious utopian community, it reorganized as a joint-stock manufacturer of silver flatware, and did pretty well for itself.

Noyes, on the other hand, found himself fleeing for a simpler life again – this time in Canada.

Article Author: Mental_Floss

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