A HISTORY LESSON

Churches. Cathedrals. Tabernacles. Temples. Meeting Houses. 

Religious edifices symbolize man’s effort to glorify and appease a more powerful creator. It’s a calling, a longing, a challenge, a primal need. Architects give it their all and artists enhance, embellish, create, and interpret. The pull is as old as humankind.  So it isn’t any surprise that we visit, photograph, and write about these structures probably more than any other manmade object in the world.

Which brings me to …THE WORLD’S SMALLEST CHAPEL! 

The Cross Island Chapel is non-denominational, seats two, measures 51 inches by 81 inches and rises out of Mason Pond in Oneida, New York.

The chapel was built by Chandler Mason and his son in 1989 and “Dedicated as a witness to God.” Unless you can walk on water, you can only reach the little white building by row boat or a quick swim. The pond and the chapel remain in the Mason family.

Weird, eh? But it’s in ONEIDA!  And that’s a story that so far outstrips weird that the definition needs a good stretch! 

In 1848,(remember the Second Great Awakening?)  John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community. I remind you that just down the road in Palmyra, Joseph Smith founded the Mormons  and around the corner, the Shakers… all around the same time. Middle New York State was bristling with religious visionaries. 

The Oneida Community built a community house for its 300 + participants.  The guiding theory was that Jesus had returned to earth in AD70 and so, believers (that would be, them) were perfect and without sin. 

All men and women were presumed “married to one another” and that puts a whole different spin on sex, division of labor and “family.” Birth control (male coitus interruptus) was practiced rather successfully  - as was selective breeding. Children were removed from the birth parent at around a year old and raised by the commune. Without the constraints of exclusive responsibility for home and hearth, women were encouraged to be equal partners in pretty much everything. 

The community manufactured, grew, traded and/or sold a variety of commodities successfully but clouds were on the horizon. By the late 1800s, led by a professor from Hamilton College nearby, an organized band of clergy began protesting the ideas and living arrangements of the Oneidas.  Old John, the founder, turned over the community to a son who lacked the leadership qualities to keep the band en point. The maturing second generation members were drawn to monogamy, sexual exclusivity and jealousy.

By the turn of the century, the Oneida Community reverted to a purely industrial limited stock company. For a century, Oneida became synonymous with silverware.  The flatware company sent manufacturing off shore in the early 2000s and was subsequently sold to a foreign owner. 

The community Mansion house still stands in Oneida. It has been lived in continuously since its construction in 1862 and today incorporates 35 apartments, 9 dorm rooms, 9 guest rooms, a museum, meeting and dining rooms and is listed as a National Landmark Historic building.