Companies

For well over a hundred years, the Michiana area has had help in "feeling better fast." From the home remedies and medicine show treatments of the past, an entire industry grew from the inquiring minds of long-ago physicians. From Dr.Franklin Miles who founded Miles Laboratories, Inc. in 1884 to Whitehall Laboratories who first built a plant in Elkhart in 1946, the pharmaceutical industry was of prime importance to the workers of Michana in this century.

The employees wore white uniforms and had a fierce loyalty to the industry over the years, even as the numbers of jobs shrunk and the moving and closing of facilities began. Where once sons and daughters followed the tradition of joining their parents at the same workplace, now many of those jobs are gone.

Accra-Pak, who set up operations in the 1960's in the Michiana area, is a sub-contractor to many national pharmaceutical and beauty products manufacturers has expanded its facilities over the past few years.

A sense of shared history links those who worked in this industry and a feeling of family-like ties still exist even among those who no longer work in it. A desire to remain in touch is strong, and plenty of "remember?" stories are still swapped at chance or planned meetings.

We invite you to share those stories with us and the other readers of this page. Tell us about the line workers and secretaries, the mechanics and the millwrights who helped to produce the products that became household names all over the world. Tell us your tough times and your fun times. Tell us the triumphs and tragedies of working in an industry that began small and became big.

Click on the "tell us" link on the home page to send us your stories and check back to this site to look for what our readers share with us.

On the left are several pharmaceutical company names. As we get information, we plan to do a brief history of each company and add detail from our readers. Tell us what you know and remember about any particular company. And if we've forgotten to list one, tell us about it, and we'll add it to the list.

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