Our heritage
From a communal farm in upstate New York to the American kitchen drawer.
The company began as a religious commune on a creek in upstate New York and ended up making half the flatware in America. This is the short version; the long one is in the Journal.
1848: a farm on Oneida Creek
John Humphrey Noyes brought a group of Christian Perfectionists from Putney, Vermont to land beside Oneida Creek. The community they built held property and work in common and grew to around three hundred people living in a single building, the Mansion House, which they extended in phases until 1880 and which still stands as a museum and National Historic Landmark.
Traps and silk before spoons
The community funded itself first with animal traps and a silk thread mill. Both taught it metal and fibre work at scale, and by the late 1870s that accumulated skill had turned toward knives, forks and spoons.
1880: the commune becomes a company
Under external pressure and internal strain, the community dissolved and reorganised as a joint-stock company, distributing shares among its members. The same people in the same buildings became shareholders in a manufacturer.
1899: Community Plate
Silver-plated flatware under the Community Plate mark gave a rising middle class the look of solid silver at a reachable price. It is the point where a regional metalworks became a household name.
1905: a company that built a town
Pierrepont Burt Noyes, son of the founder and raised inside the community, laid out Sherrill, New York for the workforce and paid bonuses to employees who built their own houses there. Sherrill remained the manufacturing heart of the business for most of the twentieth century.
1961: stainless
The move to stainless steel matched the arrival of the dishwasher in American kitchens and turned a full service from a milestone purchase into an ordinary one. What the alloy numbers mean is covered in the metal guide.
The 1980s peak, and after
At its height the company made at least half of all flatware bought in the United States. Then came the same pressures that met most American consumer manufacturing: Chapter 11 in 2006, the bankruptcy of parent EveryWare Global in 2015, and acquisition by Lenox Corporation in 2021.
What survives
Three things: a back catalogue of patterns a hundred and forty years deep, open stock that lets an inherited service stay in use, and the standard a company sets when it supplies half a national market for a generation.