(Oneida, NY – June 2013) The Oneida Community Mansion House opens two new exhibits on June 28: “Local History in Maps” and “Oneida Game Traps, 1852-1925: The Edward J. Knobloch Collection.”
“Oneida Game Traps” features a representative selection of traps sold by the Oneida company under the names Newhouse and Victor and still considered the world’s best. The permanent exhibit contains more than fifty types of traps and illustrates how local trap-making began with the Oneida Community (1848-1880), a famous experiment in utopian living.
One Community member, Sewell Newhouse, was a blacksmith who had taught himself to hand-forge traps better than anything ever seen. After inventing machines to mechanize trap manufacture, the Oneida Community dominated North American trapping. “No professional trapper would look at anything else,” a Community member recalled, “and its adoption by the great Hudson Bay Company placed it apparently on a safe footing. There was but one trap in the market and its name was ‘Newhouse.'”
In 1881, the Oneida Community became Oneida Community, Ltd., a business which greatly expanded trap manufacturing. By the early 1900s, two thirds of the world’s traps were made in Sherrill, New York. In all, Oneida made about 120 million traps and their profits financed the tableware industry of Oneida Ltd. and built the factories of Sherrill.
The story of America’s top trap-maker can now be seen in the Mansion House by viewing the Knobloch collection, the finest archive of Oneida trap history ever assembled. Publicly displayed for the first time is Sewall Newhouse’s legendary gun.
The map exhibit, which will run through the end of the year, features about a dozen works including several recent donations, showcasing the museum’s little known map holdings. Most are on public display for the first time. Ranging from the 1850s to the 1950s, these maps illustrate our past in the form of building locations, roads and railroads; water and trolley lines; a golf course and a cemetery. They show the world in plan, from the air, in isometric projection, and even in imaginary view.
Curated by Anthony Wonderley, OCMH curator of collections, and installed by Maria Skinner (Simply Designed Spaces), the display includes early wall maps of Madison and Oneida Counties which show houses and identify their owners. There are maps illustrating features of Oneida Community life documented nowhere else. The majority reveal the look of Kenwood and Sherrill around 1900. Supplementary panels with photographs, designed by Don Cornue (Sign & Art, Etc), amplify two stories told in the maps: how Sherrill grew over time and the railway line that passed near the Mansion House.
The Oneida Community Mansion House was the home of the 19th century utopian Oneida Community (1848-1880). Today, the 93,000 square foot brick building houses a museum, residential apartments, overnight lodging, and banquet and meeting space.
The Oneida Community Mansion House is located at 170 Kenwood Ave., Oneida.
For information, call 315-363-0745 or visit www.oneidacommunity.org.