Sewell Newhouse was a member of the Oneida Community.

Walter Edmonds wrote about him in his history of the Community and Oneida
Limited, _The First Hundred Years_ 1848-1948.

On pages 22-21, you find:

"The packing of fruits and vegetables was always, for sentimental reasons,
the favorite industry of the Community; but its chief support came from the
manufacture of steel traps. When Noyes and his party moved from Putney to
Oneida, they found a lank, long-jawed Vermonter named Sewell Newhouse
established on the site of the old Indian Castle, two miles from Kenwood.
Newhouse had a small blacksmith's shop in which every year he made a few
traps and a rifle or two. The traps were bought mostly by the neighboring
Indians. They cost sixty-two cents apiece, and in his most active years
Newhouse might make between one and two thousand of them, but he generally
interrupted his working season with at least one trip into the woods to do a
little trapping on his own account. He was primarily a woodsman in manner
and habits, and when he joined the Community a year after its start, though
he was always a loyal member, he went pretty much his own way. No member,
for instance, was supposed to keep a dog; but it was noticed that whenever
Newhouse set off to get himself a rabbit, he would always be picked up by a
pretty good hound at one or other of the neighboring farms. It was natural
therefore for him to keep on with his small trap business which, after all,
brought a few dollars into the Community every year.

But when in 1852 it was decided to turn the Community's energies into
manufacturing, Noyes and his associates realized that in Newhouse's traps
they had a product ready to hand. Newhouse was a superior mechanic and in
the course of experimenting and through his own experience in the woods had
worked out a design far superior to the average trap then on the market. His
traps caught game and held it; and unlike many imported traps of that day,
the springs were scientifically tempered and did not break in the extreme
cold of the North American winters."