The Oneida Community was founded in upstate New York in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a former theological student who believed that paradise could be found on Earth through nontraditional sexual and familial structures, including complex marriages and communal childraising. Hundreds of people followed him, and for many years their community succeeded. But the center could not hold, and the community pivoted — into a thriving business that became one of the world’s most prominent makers of flatware.