I believe that's the Sewell Newhouse who invented the steel trap that became
the principal industry of the Oneida Community and its main source of income
(before it got into making silverware). According to "Oneida, Utopian
Community to Modern Corporation," by Maren Lockwood Carden, he had come to
the Oneida Community in 1848 from the nearby village of Oneida Castle. "By
the mid-1850s the trap industry was flourishing," her book says.
It also relates that Sewell Newhouse was the only dissenter in 1880 when the
Community adopted a "plan of division." In essence, it went out of business
as a utopian community and liquidated its assets by apportioning its stock
among the members.
"Because Sewell Newhouse continue to oppose the Plan of Division throiughout
the breakup, his shares were held for him by another member. Five years
later, at the age of 79, he finally withdrew his objection that -- as the
inventor of Oneida's animal trap -- he deserved a larger share, and accepted
his assigned stock."
That would seem to imply that he was born in 1806.
There are many books and articles about the Oneida Community and John
Humphrey Noyes who headed it and chronicled it. I'd guess Newhouse is
mentioned in many of them. "The Communistic Societies of the United States,"
by Charles Nordhoff, published in 1875, says only that "trap making was
begun at Oneida in 1855" but doesn't mention Newhouse by name. Perhaps
Noyes's own "The History of American Socialisms," published in 1869, does,
but I don't have it at hand..
A direct descendant of Newhouse -- Milford Newhouse -- was a photographer
at The Rome Daily Sentinel in Rome, N. Y. in 1948-49. He'd be in his 80s
today if he's alive at all. Milford's mother, a gracious, reflective lady,
then lived in the Mansion House, as did many descendants of the Community
members. As I recall, she was either the first person born of conventional
wedlock after the uptopian community dissolved, or the last person born in
the Perfectionist system.
William
Ringle
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