Pierrepont B. Noyes, 1897-1950

In the summer of 1948, a huge celebration was staged in Sherrill's Noyes Park to commemorate the one hundred years since the founding of the Oneida Community. During these intervening years the utopian community had been voluntarily abandoned and succeeded by a commercial enterprise called Oneida Community, Ltd. This latter incorporated the productive assets of the original Community and many of its principles and people. A young man now grown old, Pierrepont B. Noyes, born in the Community, had overseen the development of the company from a producer of various products to a major manufacturer of silverplated flatware. At 78 years of age, he was still at the head of the company he had been leading since 1897.

Filling the park, several thousand employees and their families celebrated the occasion in a city that did not exist when Noyes took command of the company. For those with a historical bent, the place where it all began — the Oneida Community's home, the Mansion House — was open to visitors to tour and take in displays about life in the old days. For those who wanted to see how things were produced, tours of the company's factories were available. Speeches were minimal, goodwill was abundant, a good time was had by all ages. In the evening Tommy Dorsey played his theme song, "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" to dancers under the stars. It was surely a sentimental occasion for many who were there and especially those who had been involved in the evolution of the great enterprise from modest and shaky beginnings to solid and promising circumstance.

Noyes was born in the Mansion House in 1870, a son of the Community's founder, John Humphrey Noyes. Formal education in the Community could be problematic; nonetheless, a love of learning and "improvement" was instilled and not just in its younger generation. Adult education classes were also a regular feature of Community life. A number of Community children would later graduate from various colleges following the Community's break-up in 1881.

As Noyes was well short of the academic background necessary for college admission and with little chance of getting it locally, in 1886 he entered a preparatory school, Colgate Academy, located in Hamilton, N. Y. Based on year-end exams, he was able to skip the next year and return as a senior. In the fall of 1887, he returned to Hamilton but, in a fit of nostalgia for the friends of his youth, he dropped out in November and entered the Loomis Academy which had been started in the home of the former Community where Professor Loomis had been hired to teach the 27 ex-Community children. Noyes wanted to be with them.

Graduating from the Loomis Academy, he was able to enter Madison University (now known as Colgate University), a school dedicated to producing Baptist preachers. After two years at Madison, Noyes had run through the entire non-theological curriculum and, not wishing to enter the ministry, he traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1890 to see about entering Harvard. Despite being rebuffed by a secretary, he managed to reach the dean in charge of admission and worked out an arrangement whereby he would return in September to be tested on various subjects. If he passed, he could then study Harvard's junior year curriculum on his own at home. Following this solitary effort, he would again be tested to see if he had passed his "junior year" and could then become a senior at Harvard.

Noyes returned to Harvard three weeks ahead of the initial qualifying period. After intensive cramming, he was able to pass five Latin exams, four Greek exams, five math exams and one exam each in French, German and Roman/Greek history. Having never studied Greek history previously, he read the text the night before the examination. He had taught himself German in three weeks.

Returning home, Noyes set about tackling the course work for the junior year. Unfortunately, his mother sickened in the spring of 1891 and was diagnosed as terminally ill. Devastated by this news, he abandoned his studies and dedicated himself to caring for his mother. So ended his formal education although he eventually did receive a college degree. After many years of service on its board of trustees and 60 years after entering its Academy, Noyes was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Colgate University.

Following his mother's death and a year of factory work at Oneida, he set off with his brother, Holton, for New York City in 1892. Their plan was simple: make a fortune by playing the stock market. Soon enough, they were stripped of their modest capital and disabused of that ambition. Fortunately, they were helped by a cousin, Mr. George Miller (the New York agent for Oneida Community products), who bolstered their partnership ("Noyes Brothers"), then set them up to sell silverware to restaurants and small stores.

In this sell-or-starve situation, Noyes learned a great deal about persuasion and persistence. He was able to increase his territory to include Upstate New York and some of Pennsylvania and began to generate some large orders. Accordingly, Mr. Miller increased the scope of Noyes' sales activities. Noyes was then able to sell steel traps and chains along with silverware to wholesalers and large department stores located in New England and several large East Coast cities. On top of this, he became a director of the company when his Uncle Abram temporarily gave up his seat on Oneida's board in 1894. This gave Pierrepont Noyes, at a young age, an insight into the company's operations that was to be fateful.

Most members of Oneida's board of directors had recently taken up the popular, late 19th-century fad of Spiritualism. Given the board's general lack of business background — with or without visitations from the spirit world — it was no wonder that company profits were suffering. Along with several "non-spiritualist" directors, Noyes conducted a stock fight which he won by a very narrow margin at the stockholders meeting of 1895. Now with a majority of shareholders behind him, Noyes was made manager of the Niagara Falls department which produced table flatware — the eventual future of the company.

Despite managerial responsibilities, he enlarged his sales work to all lines of product and categories of trade — retail, mail order (Sears & Roebuck), restaurants, and premiums — whatever it took to keep the factory busy. However, in the course of running the factory, he learned of troubling conditions which were to re-ignite the attitude and experience of his...