I love the Internet.
While reading up on the corporate history of Anchor Hocking, another company in the pedigree of what is now called EveryWare is a brand known as Oneida, which is based in New York and you probably recognize as a maker of china products and flatware The description on the EveryWare web page was startling
The Oneida Community was a religious and social society founded in Oneida, New York, by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers. The Oneida Community was founded on Noyes’ theology of Perfectionism, a form of Christianity with two basic values, self-perfection and communalism. The Oneida Community canned fruits and vegetables and made traps, chain, traveling bags, straw hats, mop sticks and sewing silk. Eventually, the Oneida Community members began making silver knives, forks and spoons as the Oneida Silversmiths.
Digging deeper:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/cities/oneida.html
the most famous rule that Noyes imposed was based on Christ’s teaching that there would be no marriage in Heaven. Therefore, Noyes believed that on earth all men were married to all women, and that the men and women in the community should be sexually intimate with a variety of partners. Noyes called this practice complex marriage. Complex marriage was essential to Noyes, because he felt that it moved the community beyond the traditionally divisive commitments to one partner or the family, and raised this love and loyalty inherent in those commitments to the level of the community, just as he envisioned it in Heaven. The practice of complex marriage was regulated by the practice of what Noyes called “male continence”, a highly successful form of birth control. Noyes needed to control pregnancy so he could control which members of the community parented children, and through this type of social engineering people his community with only the “best” individuals.
I can provide info on some other eccentric religious groups in NY State. I grew up not far from Albany (the capitol). The Shakers were another odd group – they were completely celibate (another shot at perfection) which did little for continuing the group of course. Today, they are known for their furniture most of all.
The Shakers kept things alive barely by running an orphanage and indoctrinating their acquisitions about the no sex ever rule, but eventually someone decided that wasn’t appropriate, and the last of the old ladies eventually died.
Noyes had his belief based on Mathew 22. Jesus said there is no marriage in Heaven, but I don’t think that precludes it on Earth. While the Old Testament is full of wives, marriage and begetting, it doesn’t seem to be a big topic in the New Testament.
https://kpharri.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/marriage-in-the-new-testament/
Being the kind of person am, I suspect he considered himself the only man worthy of reproducing.