You probably think “utopia” is somewhere else—like in the Himalayas, or maybe Hawaii—and not in your own backyard. But from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, many utopian communities sprang up around the country—three of them in upstate New York.
THE GIFT OF BEING SIMPLE
The first Shakers—members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—came from England with their leader, Mother Ann Lee, in 1774 and settled near Albany, New York. Shakers are usually remembered for their religious rituals of dancing and shaking, and for their finely made handcrafts and furniture. But Shaker doctrines also included communal living (common ownership of all property and goods), celibacy, and productive labor, as well as equality of the sexes and pacifism. By 1830, there were 19 Shaker communities from Maine to Kentucky, but it was the community called Mount Lebanon in Columbia County, New York, that became the spiritual and ideological center of the entire movement.
Mount Lebanon was founded in 1785 by Father James Whittaker, who envisioned it as a model for all Shaker communities. Since worship was the most important thing to Shakers, Whittaker built the “meetinghouse” (church) first, and Mount Lebanon expanded from there to include more than 100 buildings on 6,000 acres. It was so large that in 1861 the federal government awarded the settlement its own post office. The community supported itself by selling high-quality seeds (Shakers invented the seed packet in 1816), herbs and herbal medicines (some 100,000 pounds of dried herbs were sold each year in the 1850s), and those distinctive Shaker-style handmade chairs.
Mount Lebanon was the biggest and most successful of the Shaker communities and lasted longer than almost all the others, but by the 1930s, even it was failing—partly because of the sect’s emphasis on chastity, which meant they had to replenish their numbers solely by recruiting converts. And with cheap manufactured products available, few people still wanted the handmade Shaker goods—and during the Great Depression, most couldn’t afford to buy them anyway. The last seven residents left in 1947, and today only a small part of the Mount Lebanon compound remains. Mount Lebanon Shaker Village was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
You can’t get much more utopian than thinking it’s possible to achieve perfection on Earth, and that’s what John Humphreys Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, believed. He called his unorthodox doctrine simply “Perfectionism,” and—since it defied prevailing Christian belief in the earthly sinfulness of man—it got him kicked out of Yale Divinity School. In 1840, with a group of about 35 followers, Noyes went to Putney, Vermont, to start a religious commune run on his strict principles. “Mutual Criticism” required all members (except Noyes) to endure organized sessions of criticism of any “bad traits” that threatened the community, and “Complex Marriage” held that every man in the commune considered himself married to every woman (and vice versa) and that no couple was allowed to form a lasting attachment. Monogamy, Noyes asserted, was a “tyrannical institution.”
Noyes also advocated what he called “stirpiculture,” a kind of selective breeding that he believed would produce ever more perfect children. Members who wanted children were carefully matched, and all other couples were expected to use birth control to avoid producing unwanted (less perfect) kids.
These unorthodox ideas outraged the local citizens of Putney and their religious leaders, who persecuted the members of the commune and even had Noyes indicted for adultery. So Noyes fled Vermont and bought 23 acres of land in Oneida, New York. In 1848 he and 45 followers established a new community there. Noyes laid out strict rules for every aspect of life in the Oneida Community: In particular, everyone was expected to work, and even though women did most of the domestic jobs, they were considered to be equal to men. The community didn’t attract many members (by 1878, there were only 306), but it did manage to launch a profitable business—Oneida Community Limited, a corporation that started out making tin-plated spoons and graduated to making inexpensive Oneida flatware and silverware.
The first town to be established in Queens: Astoria (1837).
Noyes did not fare well with critics outside his community. In 1879, he was forced to flee to Canada, just ahead of an arrest warrant for statutory rape. He never returned to the U.S., and the commune didn’t survive long without him; it dissolved in January 1881. However, Oneida Community Limited continued to make silverware and cutlery into the 21st century. It stopped manufacturing in 2005.
WORKING FOR THE MAN
In the late 1800s, Elbert Hubbard was a marketing genius with a lucrative job at the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York, but he longed for more than soap salesmanship—he wanted success (and fame) as a writer and philosopher. When commercial publishers rejected his work, he took matters into his own hands. In 1895, he moved to East Aurora, New York, and founded the Roycroft Press to produce hand-printed, hand-bound books—including his own. Around the press, he shaped his own little kingdom, an idealistic artisan community called Roycroft.
Hubbard was deeply influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement, whose members believed that even everyday objects should be beautiful. The craftspeople and artists Hubbard gathered at Roycroft soon branched out from printing to leatherwork, copperwork, and furniture-making. “The Roycrofters,” Hubbard said, “are a small band of workers who make beautiful books and things—making them as good as they can.” And good work translated into good sales—the compound made a lot of money for Hubbard.
But Roycroft was more than just a factory. The Roycrofters (almost 500 of them by 1910) lived communally, sharing meals, meetings, and games, but Hubbard was definitely the leader and decision-maker. He provided housing and jobs for his followers, organized farming so they could be self-sufficient, encouraged their artistic expression, and entertained them with concerts, festivals, and lectures. On Sunday nights, he preached to the community on the principles of clean living…even though he’d carried on an affair with a younger woman (a suffragette named Alice Moore) while he was still married, got her pregnant, and wound up in a scandalous divorce.
An 1897 fire on Ellis Island destroyed all immigration records dating back to 1855.
Hubbard married Moore in 1904, and in 1915, both drowned in the sinking of the Lusitania. The ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat, an event that eventually pulled the United States into World War I. The Roycrofters struggled along without them until the Great Depression finally finished them off in the 1930s. Today, 14 of the original buildings still exist on the original site, and the “Roycroft Campus” was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. Elbert Hubbard’s most famous descendant: his nephew L. Ron Hubbard, of Scientology fame.
Emerald green hills surround the small, central New York town of Chittenango where L. Frank Baum was born. In 1900 Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a children’s book that became 13-book series and, in 1939, a world-famous movie. Baum was just four years old when he moved the 15 miles to nearby Syracuse, but Chittenango still takes honoring its most famous native son—or at least the books he wrote—very seriously.
In Chittenango, the sidewalks of Genesee Street are paved with yellow concrete stamped to look like brick. (They used to be real yellow bricks, but over time, snow, rain, and ice ruined them.) Oz fans can stop for a bite to eat at the Emerald City Grill, grab dessert at Oz Cream, or buy a souvenir at the Land of Oz and Ends. And every year, during the first week of June, the town holds an Oz-Stravaganza with parades, costumes, rides, and a tribute to the 124 actors who played Munchkins in the famous 1939 film.
During the 1980s, actor Meinhardt Raabe—he played the Munchkin coroner who sang that the Wicked Witch of the East was “really, most sincerely dead”—often came to the celebration. Raabe died in 2010 at the age of 94, but other Munchkin actors still show up and sign autographs in “Glinda’s Royal Tent.” The 2010 festival included appearances by 90-year-old Jerry Maren (Lollypop Kid), 91-year-old, Karl Slover (Soldier), and 86-year-old Margaret Pelligrini (Sleepyhead). Pelligrini even wore a copy of her original costume…featuring a flowerpot on her head.
NYC has 15 miles of beaches.