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 Britis