Der Lotos Club (eBook)

The Schieffelin Legacy in America

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art recently acquired a well-executed altar panel, The Visitation, by the German Renaissance artist Hans Schäufelein (ca. 1480 - ca. 1540). Schäufelein was one of the most gifted pupils of Albrecht Dürer, painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German artist of his time. Hans was also one of the first Schieffelin ancestors (the spellings differed a bit in earlier times) about whom concrete knowledge exists. He lived and worked in the Bavarian town of Nördlingen.

Two hundred years after Schäufelein’s painting was finished, his direct descendant, Jacob Schieffelin (the first of three early Jacobs), still lived in Nördlingen. Jacob I traveled to the New World to seek his fortune but returned to Germany. His son Jacob II sailed to Philadelphia and stayed. His son, the third Jacob Schieffelin, was born in Philadelphia in 1757 and remained permanently in North America until his death in 1835. He lived a long and productive life as one of the early Republic’s leading business entrepreneurs. Jacob III became in effect the Schieffelin family’s American founding father.

Jacob III’s work and name, passed down through generations of the drug business he helped found in 1794, created a strong sense of family identity and continuity. “Schieffelin” came to mean not merely a name on a genealogy chart but a proud family institution—tangible bricks, people, products, innovation, reputation and public service sustained across time. Like Schäufelein’s art, the company named Schieffelin was concrete, visible and pathbreaking. Its centennial history published in 1894 celebrated a hundred years “always under the name of Schieffelin and always with members descended in a direct line from the founder.” By the twentieth century it was among the very oldest companies in the United States.

Jacob Schieffelin III’s career demonstrated how an energetic and creative entrepreneur could achieve business success in post-Revolutionary New York City. Jacob had fought conspicuously on the Loyalist side, helping to fund provisions for British troops in Canada. He had been captured and imprisoned by the Americans. But Jacob was hardly an ideological supporter of British rule. His German heritage gave him a certain freedom of political and geographical movement; he easily switched sides according to where business opportunities seemed most promising. After he escaped from American captivity in 1780, he returned to British New York where he was billeted in the home of the Quaker merchant John Lawrence. The Lawrence clan was pacifist but leaned toward the American cause.

Jacob promptly fell in love with Lawrence’s daughter, Hannah, described at the time as a “noted beauty and popular poetess.” Hannah was no pacifist but strongly pro-American. Her incendiary anti-royalist verse might have gotten her hanged if she had ever been caught. Their 1780 marriage made New Yorkers forget Jacob’s former British sympathies. It also supplied him with useful business connections to various Lawrences, especially his brother-in-law John. With John he created in 1794 the wholesale drug-importing and shipping firm that soon would bear his name alone, Schieffelin & Company. The firm endured for seven generations until the late 20th century.

Although the drug business is Jacob’s best-known legacy, he initiated many other major projects, including a real estate venture to develop the neighborhood of Manhattanville in New York City as a planned community. He also sold land for Alexander Hamilton to build his family home. Jacob died in 1835, a prosperous and respected member of the New York business community. Over the decades, the Schieffelin company grew and relocated, but always remained physically near the warehouses and docks of lower Manhattan.

Meanwhile the entrepreneurial bug bit many of Jacob III’s children and their descendants. A son, also named Jacob, for example, moved to Pennsylvania on land his father had bought as an investment and forged a successful international business career. Jacob IV’s colorful grandson “Ed” Schieffelin (1847-1897) spent a lifetime wandering the American West as a prospector, miner and “character.” His silver discoveries at what he named Tombstone, Arizona, made him rich and famous in the 1870s. After his somewhat mysterious death at age 49, he was buried just outside Tombstone in miner’s clothing alongside his pick and canteen. The town and his tombstone remain tourist attractions today.

Eugene Schieffelin (1827-1906), the son of Jacob IV’s brother Henry Hamilton Schieffelin, was equally colorful. He rivaled Ed in fame and surpassed him in eccentricity. Driven by the curious desire to introduce into America all species of birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, Eugene in 1890 released a flock of imported starlings in New York’s Central Park, with enormous consequences for much of the North American continent. The starlings multiplied rapidly to become what is generally regarded as an invasive pest that tends to displace some indigenous, useful birds.

Eugene’s father, Henry Hamilton Schieffelin, succeeded Jacob III as head of Schieffelin & Company for 35 years. The father lacked the son’s weirdness but possessed the business acumen which kept the Schieffelin name prominent in New York over the nineteenth century. Another of Henry’s sons, Samuel Bradhurst Schieffelin followed his father as senior partner. Upon Samuel’s retirement in 1865, the family business passed to his only son, William Henry Schieffelin. The latter ran the company until his death in 1895. William Henry was the father of William Jay Schieffelin, my grandfather known as Pop, who took over until the 1920s.

The three decades after 1880 were momentous for both the country and the company. The pharmaceutical industry was not only expanding greatly but being transformed by the rise of scientific chemistry in America. William Henry Schieffelin built a small laboratory in 1882 to manufacture finished drugs for distribution to retailers. This approach was very different from the prior one of owning large warehouses just to store imported chemicals and other products prior to distribution. The oldest son, William Jay Schieffelin, my grandfather, was brought up to believe that the new scientific chemistry held the future of the wholesale drug industry. His father encouraged him to make chemistry his future career.

And at the beginning he did just that. Young Willie Schieffelin studied chemistry as an undergraduate at the Columbia School of Mines, the applied science branch of Columbia University. Like many future scientists and scholars of his generation he then traveled to Germany to learn what the Old World could teach the New about research. He received his chemistry Ph.D. in 1889 at age 23 from the lab of Professor Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich. Willie published several chemistry research papers after he joined the family business in 1890. Science would soon transform the pharmaceutical industry, and the Schieffelin company seemed well positioned to be a leader in that transformation.

By the mid-19th century the name Schieffelin had come to represent successful business entrepreneurship in New York City. The family had emerged respected, wealthy, and well-known in commercial circles. William Henry’s branch of the Schieffelin family would now become linked to families far better-known in national social, political and financial circles through two marriages 28 years apart.

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, William Henry Schieffelin married Mary Jay (1846–1916). Mary was a great-granddaughter of John Jay, one of the nation’s most prominent Founding Fathers and the first Chief Justice of the United States. John Jay had been dead for 34 years in 1863, but his place among the revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers was secure.

Jay had twice been Governor of New York and had written some of the famous Federalist Papers which provided intellectual background for Constitutional debates. He had drafted the Treaty of Paris which ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, and later the Jay Treaty of 1794 which avoided war with England.

As the years passed, the slavery question grew in prominence. Jay and his descendants became prominent actors in that national drama. Jay was a slaveholder. But he also opposed slavery and freed his own slaves well before he died. He early endorsed a “gradualist” approach toward slavery’s eventual elimination. In 1799 slavery in New York State was abolished by the legislature; but the law took effect only in 1827. The New York decision, however, had the effect of closely associating Jay’s name and later life with the antislavery cause.

His son, Judge William Jay (1789-1858), devoted essentially his entire adult life to the promotion of emancipation. William Jay’s son John Jay II (1817-1894) was the leading activist lawyer defending fugitive slaves in New York during the 1840s and 1850s and also a tireless crusader against racism in the Episcopal church.

John Jay II lived until 1894 as a patriot-statesman whose interest in good government and African-American progress kept the Jay name in the public eye. One of the founders of the Republican Party, John Jay II later served as United States Minister to Austria-Hungary between 1869 and 1875. While in Vienna Mary’s sister, Anna Jay, re-established the family’s German connection by marrying the German diplomat Lothar von Schweinitz. Anna’s grandson...