Noyes called the community's economic system Bible Communism: property was held in common, work was assigned across trades rather than by sex alone, and income came from manufacturing rather than agriculture, which was unusual among the era's communal experiments. An early success making steel animal traps, the Newhouse trap, gave the community capital that it diversified into silk thread, fruit preserving, and eventually silver-plated tableware, and by the 1870s Oneida was a going manufacturing concern as much as a religious household.
The end came from two directions at once. Younger members raised inside the system increasingly wanted conventional marriage rather than the arrangement their parents had built, and outside pressure, including from clergy who had campaigned against the community for years, revived the threat of prosecution that had already driven Noyes out of Vermont once. In 1879, warned that a warrant was likely, Noyes left for Canada and never returned to live at Oneida; complex marriage was abandoned within the community that same year, and many members paired off in conventional marriages soon after.
In 1881 the community formally dissolved and reorganised as Oneida Community Limited, a joint-stock company owned by the former members, which converted communal property into shares. The company dropped Bible Communism entirely and kept the manufacturing, and its descendant, Oneida Limited, remained one of the best known names in American tableware for more than a century afterward. A religious experiment in living without private property or private marriage ended, in practice, as a privately held silverware company, which is the form in which most people now encounter its name.