A Bright Shiny Object That Answered an Old Question

An email from familysearch.org the other day sent me looking at grave markers for relatives that the familysearch site had collected in a slideshow.  Flipping through these led me to the Sweet family and then to a couple of relatives I hadn’t seen/found burial information for yet (I checked), including Cinderella Sweet Towner (mother of Lillian Sweet Towner Allen who created the Sweet Family tree I wrote about years ago).  And it turned out that she was buried in the Oneida Community Cemetery in New York even though she had lived and died in California.  What?!  And her husband James was also buried there.  Hm…

I had written earlier about the serendipitous finding of Lillian Sweet Towner Allen’s “Sweet Family Ancestral Tablet” in the Special Collections of the University of Syracuse Library.  At that time, and until now in truth, I had no way of guessing why she had left it to the University Library in Syracuse.  She lived in California for pete’s sake!  The minimal information I had about this family led me to assume that Cinderella had married James Towner in Ohio and they had then shortly started migrating West.  This was not an unusual pattern and I did not question my assumptions.

Well, a little more following of the BSO showed me that Lillian’s father, James W. Towner was a member of the Oneida Community for a period of time and both he and Lillian’s mother were buried in the Oneida Community Cemetery.  As it turned out, Lillian herself is also buried there.  Findagrave.com showed this information and more, including a website about the Community that added biographical information for James Towner.  I wish I had known this when we visited the Oneida Mansion and Museum on our New York State road-trip last June.  I would have loved to see the cemetery.  We were able to stay one night in the Mansion, and had a tour the next morning, both of which were great experiences.

James Towner had migrated from New York where he was born to northern Ohio by 1850.  There he met and married Cinderella A. Sweet and he studied theology.  James became a Universalist minister in Westfield, Medina, Ohio about the same time.  The young Towner family migrated to Franklin County, Iowa in 1854, and it was here that James began to read law.  He was admitted to the bar in Iowa in 1859.  Both Lillian and her next older brother, Frederick, were born in Iowa.  James enlisted in the Army at the outset of the Civil War for a three year period, but he was discharged before the end of his three years when several injuries disabled him for field service.  He went on to serve in the Invalid Corps doing post and garrison duty until July 1866.

I think that the Towners continued to live in Iowa during the War, however it is possible that Cinderella and the young children moved back to Ohio to her family.   It was in northern Ohio following the War that James joined the New Berlin Free Love group in Berlin Heights.  This group apparently was short-lived, however it had focused James’s interest in this social movement.  By 1874 the Towners had moved to New York, and James joined the Onieda Community with some of the defunct New Berlin group.  He is said to have also practiced as a lawyer in New York, and sometimes in Connecticut, during this time.

Interestingly, the history of the Oneida Community¹ includes that James was one of three men who disagreed strongly with the founder, John Noyes, about his doctrine of complex marriage.  Although this disagreement was probably related to the break-up of the Community and its conversion to a business enterprise, it was not successful.  Their unsuccessful attempt to gain control led James and some of the other members to leave New York and head west to California.  For the rest of his life, James practiced law (as he had in Iowa and New York), and at some point became a federal judge.

It also turns out that George Dutton Allen, who Lillian married in 1882, was a member of the Oneida Community as was his father.  Given that they lived in California, it would seem that George had also broken with Noyes and moved West about the time of the breakup of the Community.

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