A new trailer for an in-production feature-length documentary film about the Burned-Over District of 19th-century New York State has just been released. Burned Over focuses on Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, and the Oneida Community, a free love commune.
Both began in 1848 in the Burned-Over District, an area famous as an incubator of radical religious practice and progressive politics, inspired in part by the Second Great Awakening.
The Burned-Over District, first described in those terms in Charles Grandison Finney’s (1792–1875) posthumous 1876 autobiography, was a region in Western New York roughly between the Finger Lakes and Buffalo, including Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Livingston, Madison, Monroe, Niagara, and Oneida Counties.
It references where the religious revival is related to reform movements of the period, such as abolition, women’s rights, utopian social experiments, the anti-Masonry movement, Mormonism, temperance, vegetarianism, Spiritualism and Seventh-Day Adventism.
“The Burned-Over District was set on fire by prophets, by religious figures, by people communing with the dead,” Rochester author Thom Metzger says in the trailer, “square mile for square mile, I would put it up against any place for religious strangeness and religious power.”
The documentary trailer includes snippets of several interviews including Catskills-based author Adrian Shirk, Skidmore College professor Alexandra Prince, and the Oneida Community Mansion House’s Director of Museum Affairs Tom Guiler.
John Humphrey Noyes, the charismatic founder of the Oneida Community, strove to create heaven on earth and mandated the rejection of all forms of possession, including monogamy.
Meanwhile, the Fox sisters, Maggie and Katie, were mere girls when they began speaking to a ghost in their family’s small cottage. This impromptu séance would begin a tidal wave of conversions to Spiritualism, a faith that kept the departed within reach and existed outside the hierarchy of established churches.
“Theological controversy was much more likely to take flight,” Hamilton College’s director of special collections Christian Goodwillie says of the Burned-Over District, “and once you find out about one of these groups, it is just an endless rabbit hole.”
The film’s director, Joshua Woltermann, has been working on the project since 2019. “I was drawn into the story by the characters, who were building these radical religions to reflect the America they wanted to see,” Woltermann said.
“The past several years we have been traveling across the state from Niagara Falls to New York City and filming with fascinating people drawn to this story for a variety of reasons. The richness of this history, which most people do not know about, makes it ideal for a cinematic adaptation.”
The film is currently in production and fundraising efforts needed to complete the project are ongoing. “This is an independent documentary and these types of stories don’t get told without assembling a coalition of funding sources,” Woltermann explained.
Burned Over has received grants from the New York Council on the Arts, Humanities NY, and a fellowship from Hamilton College.
In 2021, Woltermann completed a successful Kickstarter campaign which raised $25,489 from 179 different backers. “That was what made this film possible and much of what we have accomplished is owed to support from individuals,” Woltermann said.
Filming on Burned Over is expected to continue through the year with the intention of a 2026 release, he said.
You can watch the trailer here.
Woltermann has produced several films by Ric Burns and served as producer and editor of Welcome to Leith, which premiered at Sundance and was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens.
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