Westward from Rome the land is an almost level plain, rising into the Onondaga highlands to the southward. Cazenovia Lake, among these hills, sends its outlet northward over the plain to Oneida Lake. There are various little lakelets between, but the ground is impregnated with sulphur, so that their waters are bitter, and one is consequently named Lake Sodom. Oneida is a large lake, twenty-three miles long and several miles broad, with low and marshy shores. In the fertile dairy region to the southeastward is located the "Inspiration Community" of Oneida, founded in 1847 by John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermont preacher. In 1834, when twenty-three years old, he experienced what he called a "second conversion," and announced himself a "perfectionist." He preached his new faith and finally established the Oneida Community for its demonstration, with about three hundred members. They maintain the perfect equality of women with men in all social and business relations, and have become quite wealthy as manufacturers, farmers and dairymen. The outlet of Oneida Lake, and in fact the outlet streams of all the lakes of Central New York, discharge into Oswego River, which flows northward into Lake Ontario. Oswego means "the small water flowing into that which is large," and the port at its mouth, noted for its flour and starch-mills, has about twenty-five thousand people, and is the largest city on the New York shore of Lake Ontario. This was an early French settlement in the seventeenth century, when the river was known by them as the "river of the Onondagas."