perfectionists and the weather: The Oneida community's quest for meteorological utopia, 1848-1879, The

Environmental History, Oct 2002 by Meyer, William B

For all their eagerness to seek out only what was best in their weather, the Oneidans persisted for some time in one course of action that regularly brought out its worst side. Among the Community's auxiliary doctrines was an insistence on the moral and social superiority of horticulture, the intensive cultivation of fruits and vegetables, over the more extensive forms of agriculture based on grain and livestock raising. Another was a belief in the particular goodness of fruit as an article of diet.29 Once settled at Oneida, they began to plant large quantities of strawberries, grapes, pears, plums, peaches, and currants. It was not long before they began to suffer the consequences. Yet even after cold winters, spring frosts, and other staple features of the central New York climate had many times destroyed or damaged the more delicate fruits, peaches in particular, Oneidans renewed their efforts and saw the story repeated.30 They did what they could by siting beds and orchards in warn microclimates, protecting their trees with smoke and heat on frosty nights, and choosing the hardiest varieties available for planting. They eventually built an irrigation system to guarantee their strawberry crop, among the most successful of their plantings, against the chief threat to it, drought in early summer.31 But the climate in which they lived set limits to what they could achieve. Upstate New York had areas in which even peaches could be grown with profit, but they were places where the climate was moderated by proximity to water-to lakes Erie and Ontario and to the Finger Lakes in the central-western interior.32

In the end, the Oneidans met their practical needs by shifting from growing to purchasing much of the fruit that they could not reliably produce. They saved their doctrinal consistency by blaming human action, especially local and regional deforestation, for the severity of winter in a region that they supposed must once have been as they would have liked it to be. The weather of which they complained was not God's weather; it had been spoiled by mankind. The belief was incorrect, for earlier attempts to raise peaches and the like in the vicinity, when the forest cover was greater, also had failed. Yet their conclusion was, at the time, a scientifically respectable one. The Oneidans found backing for it in George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature and in the conservationist editorials of The New York Tribune and The Horticulturist. That the selfishness of isolated individuals had swept away the protecting forest and damaged the climate for all furnished them with a new argument for communism.33

Manufacturing, the planned mainstay of their winter months, had its own problems with the weather and the seasons. The issue of wage labor was especially troubling. The Oneidans had resolved originally to do without the help of hired outside labor. Though staunchly opposed to slavery, they acknowledged the justice of antebellum Southern criticisms of the North for its wage-labor system. They would not condone any institution that associated people in heartless relations of employer and employee rather than the bonds of community love.34