Stiefel Laboratories Collection

Collection — Box: MSS Box 350

Identifier: MSS 2021.0022

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Collection comprises a small selection of documents related to Stiefel Labs and their lines of products and services as offered from the mid-1960s through the 1990s. Also included are an assortment of news clippings, a trade magazine detailing Stiefel Lab's buyout of a soap manufacturer, biographies of upper management, and a description of the research facility at Oak Hill. Photographic materials from this collection which include scenes of their original Oak Hill plant, groundbreaking ceremonies at the Research Lab site, building and facility interiors, and employee photos are housed separately as photo colleciton PC-2021-0032.

Dates

Majority of material found within 1965 - 2006

Biographical / Historical

Stiefel Laboratories began as a soap manufacuring concern lead by John David Stiefel in Germany in the 1840s. The firm grew steadily throughout the 19th century as they continued to refine, improve, and exhibit medicated soaps as treatments for dermatological maladies which were markeded in Europe and the United States. Economic conditions in Germany left the company in a shambles after successive world wars, and the company was reorganized in New York State in the late 1940s using the old Oak Hill Creamery as a manufacturing center. The Company expanded its operations rapidly through new innovations and buyouts of competitors, and was again a major global distributor of dematological medications by the 1980s. The company was bought by pharmaceutical company GSK in 2009.

Extent

.3 Cubic Feet (One expanding folder and one photo box.) : Typewritten documents and photographic prints

Additional Description

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Collection was a gift of Clifford Beede who was a former employee of Stiefel Labs at their Oak Hill research facility. He came into posession of a scrapbook through his emplpyment which was filled with loose clippings, paperwork, ephemera, and photographs related to the earliest years of the Research Laboratory.