Minister and social reformer, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. A first cousin of President Rutherford B Hayes, he was inspired by revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney, and he abandoned law to study divinity, eventually at Yale. Founding a revivalist free church there, he maintained that Christ's Second Coming had already occurred and that some beings could now live in perfect holiness. Forced to leave Yale, and deprived of a licence to preach, he formed a community of Bible communists (1836) in Putney, VT to realize his message, which also included advocacy of spousal sharing. To escape prosecution for adultery, he fled to C New York and formed the Utopian Oneida Community (1848). He wrote extensively on social and economic experiments and advocated limiting the permission to procreate to an advanced elite. In 1879 he fled to Canada to avoid a charge of statutory rape. Oneida, the most successful of the American Utopian communities, was later reorganized as a business community.
John Humphrey Noyes (September 3, 1811 – April 13, 1886) was an American utopian socialist. He founded the Oneida Community in 1848.
Life
Early activism
Noyes was born in Brattleboro, Vermont and studied at Dartmouth College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Yale Theological College.
He returned to Putney, Vermont, where he continued to preach, declaring "I took away their license to sin and they go on sinning;
Oneida
In 1847, Noyes (who had legally married Harriet Holton in 1838) was arrested for adultery. Upon receiving word that arrest warrants had been written for several of his loyal followers, the group left Vermont for Oneida, New York, where Noyes knew some friendly Perfectionists with land.
The Oneida Community, as it came to be known, survived until 1879.
Exile
In June 1879, one of Noyes' most loyal followers alerted him that he was about to be arrested for statutory rape. In the middle of the night, he fled Oneida for Ontario, Canada, where the Community had a factory.
Noyes never returned to America. When Noyes advised her to reject both proposals and take up with Myron Kinsley — the follower who had tipped him off to his impending arrest, and a man twenty years her senior — she took Noyes' advice.
John Humphrey Noyes died in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1886. His body was returned to Oneida and is buried in the Oneida Community Cemetery with many of his followers.
Legacy
In the early decades of the 20th century, Noyes' son Pierrepont consolidated the Community's industries and focused solely on silverware production. The company became known as Oneida, Limited and was the largest producer of flatware in the world for much of the 20th century. The Community's second communal dwelling, the 93,000 square foot brick "mansion house", survives today as a multi-use facility encompassing a museum, apartments, dormitory housing, guest rooms, and meeting and banquet facilities.
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