It all started in 2009, when the manager of the document library at the former-Upjohn Pfizer manufacturing site in Portage, Michigan, USA, just happened to mention to me he had run across the last remains of The Upjohn Company corporate history files. I persuaded him to transfer the dozen boxes of papers and films to my office. I went through them and discovered some fascinating historical material going all the way back to the start of The Upjohn Company in 1886.

I’ve always been a website guy. I started out using Microsoft FrontPage at home and at work in the mid-1990’s. I controlled part of the Pfizer intranet site for the Portage Plant (an intranet is an internal version of the internet, usually within a business or educational institute), so I created an intranet site for Upjohn documents that I scanned. I used a 1,000-person email distribution list of Pfizer employees for my job and at the bottom of each email I sent out to all those people on the list I included a paragraph about an Upjohn document or item with a link to that Upjohn intranet site I had created. I had to be very low-key about this because Pfizer higher-ups didn’t want to ever hear the name “Upjohn”.

Former-Upjohn employees still working at Pfizer loved all the historical information I sent out. It was a real feel-good thing for them, and I had lots of material. People started sending me more Upjohn material. By 2014 I was realizing that I could reach a lot more people if I used an internet site that was external to Pfizer. The domain name upjohn.net was available for twenty bucks a year and I already had web server space for my personal websites, so the cost was decidedly minimal.

In June 2014 I launched the Memories of The Upjohn Company website. Since the site was all about history, I wanted it to look old. I just used the most basic web page features – simple html, tables and hyperlinks. I scanned thousands of old documents and photos, then posted them on the site as jpg images. I ended up scanning pretty much everything in the twenty boxes I was originally given and a whole lot more. I had all the 16mm historic Upjohn films digitized and loaded them on YouTube with links from the website.

I liked what I was doing so much I just kept on going. Eleven years later, the Upjohn Memories site has a thousand web pages and twenty-thousand image files. The real genius that nobody will ever see is how well those twenty-one thousand files are organized in folders and subfolders. Meticulous file organization is my middle name! I’ve kept ownership of the domain name upjohn.net and I’ve been through a few web hosting companies. My experience with technology companies is most of them eventually flake out and I have to move on. I’ve never had an Upjohn Company website outage in 11 years.

Right now, I use Webcheap for hosting. They give me unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and a C-Panel interface for administration. cPanel includes Awstats for information about visitors to the site. Keeping it simple means I don’t use cPanel much but it’s good to have all that power. I don’t even bother with having upjohn.net domain email addresses. The Awstats visitor information is really helpful and validating. 

Do I keep backups? Oh boy! I’ve got backups on my C Drive, on an external hard drive and on numerous thumb drives stored at home and at my girlfriend’s house. I’ve never needed any of them but the moment I quit making backups I’ll need one in the worst way. That’s how Murphy’s Law works! Namecheap does regular backups too.

Today I use Microsoft Expression Web for web page editing and FileZilla for FTP upload to the web server. Since I don’t upload large numbers of files, a manual FTP process works fine. I have a custom Google search that can be used for just searching the site. I wish I’d been more zealous about putting information in the web page properties screen. Still, there’s enough to get to the Upjohn information people want to see.

I don’t get a lot of email, maybe a couple of dozen questions or comments a year. Some are from academics who are publishing a scientific paper and want to use Upjohn data or information. They ask if I can give them permission. There’s literally nobody else who would even answer their email, so I do give them permission. I don’t have or want any Upjohn blogs or social media groups. We all know how toxic social media has become.

I get 50,000 unique visitors a year from 25 different countries. Most visitors are from the USA. They look at 350,000 web pages and use 450GB of bandwidth. These visitor numbers do not include bots and spiders, and I'm hopeful they are fairly accurate. Think about that. My online museum of The Upjohn Company gets 50,000 visitors a year and the cost is almost nothing. Now that’s the power of technology used for positive purpose. Best of all, I’ve had a great time doing it. Someday I'll pass the administration of this website on to somebody else, but not for a while.

A BIG THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS GIVEN ME MATERIALS FOR THIS WEBSITE.

Jeremy Winkworth
June 2025

Researching The Upjohn Company

 

Presentations on The Upjohn Company

 

Encore Interview - February 2021

 

South County News Interview - May 2022

 

Visitor Statistics for Upjohn.net