Guide to the National Biscuit Company photograph album, 1900-1935

The National Biscuit Company was founded in 1898, the product of a merger among the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company, the New York Biscuit Company, and the United States Baking Company. The new conglomerate was headquartered in New York City with 114 bakeries across the United States. Over the next several decades the company grew by acquiring companies such as the F.H. Bennett Company, maker of Milk-Bone Pet Products, and the Shredded Wheat Company, maker of Triscuit Wafers and Shredded Wheat Cereal. The name "Nabisco" was first used as the name for a cracker introduced in 1901, but the corporate name did not change to Nabisco until 1971. The Uneeda Biscuit, National Biscuit Company's first packaged cracker, was the subject of the company's first million-dollar advertising campaign.

Collection comprises a photograph album containing 129 gelatin silver prints and two cyanotypes by anonymous photographers. The majority of the photographs feature storefront and grocery displays of National Biscuit Company cookies and crackers, including Oreos, Animal Crackers, Fig Newtons, Graham Crackers, Uneeda Biscuits, among others. Several of the photographs indicate that the images were taken in Buffalo, New York, and many document the National Biscuit Company's sales force there, posed formally, attending sales meetings, or engaged together in leisure activities. The album also contains photographs of horse drawn delivery wagons, a display for Milk Bone dog biscuits, children dressed in costumes that promote company products, and a classroom of children "playing store."