This past summer, Stuart Sopko ’24 worked at the Oneida Community Mansion House in Oneida, N.Y., as an Upstate Institute Summer Field School Fellow.
The Mansion House was built in 1862 by the famous Oneida Community, a Perfectionist utopia that engaged in radical social practices such as complex marriage, male continence, and shared property ownership and believed in fairness, family, and hard work. The community transitioned to a joint-stock company in 1880 and grew into Oneida Limited, once one of the world’s largest and most well-known silverware producers, which unfortunately went bankrupt in the early 2000s.
Today, the Mansion House functions as a nonprofit organization, with the mission of preserving the history surrounding the building, from the Oneida Community to Oneida Limited, and its legacy today. The Mansion House is a museum, historic inn, and residence to some individuals who descended from the original community or have a relationship with its history. In that sense, the Mansion House is a form of living history, not just another house museum.
The project I worked on this summer was researching and curating a museum exhibit that is on display in the Madison County Courthouse as part of their rotating local history exhibits program. This exhibit is inspired by the Mansion House’s Oneida Limited Oral History Project, which seeks, through interviews conducted with former employees, to preserve the history of what it was like to work for Oneida Limited and live in the area. The exhibit uses quotes from the oral histories as well as objects and photos from the Mansion House collections to tell the stories. The research conducted for the exhibit has focused on the unique aspects of Oneida Limited that led to its international success and fame, what made it such a great place to work, and what, eventually, led to its demise.
The exhibit is broken down into four themes that each highlights a different aspect of the company; innovation, community, tradition, and OCQ (Oneida Community Quality).
- Innovation focuses on the manufacturing side of the company and its renowned quality and beauty of not only their silverware but also their advertisements, which helped to make the company a household name.
- Community aims to tell about the unique family atmosphere surrounding the company — a product of the company developing the town of Sherrill, N.Y., where many of the employees lived and socialized, often using company-sponsored recreation facilities, such as the Oneida Community Golf Course.
- Tradition tells the story of Oneida Limited’s roots in the Oneida Community and how ideals such as fairness and family have been able to carry on through the generations.
- Oneida Community Quality highlights the high standard of quality to which Oneida Community members and Oneida Limited employees held themselves in all aspects of life but specifically in their work.
The physical exhibit is organized into four shelves, which each house a theme, and each shelf contains descriptive label copy panels, objects and photos from the collections, and quote cards that directly quote the oral history interviews, along with object description cards. The exhibit aims to inform the public on the history of Oneida Limited in general, as well as to attract attention to — and potential participants in — the oral history project. The exhibit is on display through the fall in the Madison County Courthouse, near the DMV. Afterward, it will hopefully move to another location.
My experience at the Mansion House this summer was amazing. I sought out the field school to have a summer job, and I was interested in the Mansion House because I thought working at the former home of a utopian society would be cool, but the experience has been so much more than that. Not only was I able to work alongside a great staff, especially Tom Guiler, the director of museum affairs, but I was also given a good deal of independence and freedom in conducting my research, searching the collections, and curating the exhibit.
It has been humbling to realize the large amounts of time and care it takes to create an exhibit, and it has been a great experience in collaboration with Tom — and with Theresa Batty, who helped greatly with graphic design. I also engaged with residents of the Mansion House, community descendants, and former Oneida Limited employees, and everyone has welcomed me with open arms. I truly feel that this experience has been more than just a summer job or a research position; I have taken a deep dive into a unique community, and I was welcomed like part of the family.