Stevenson University receives $2M gift for Owings Mills campus library

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Stevenson University has received a $2 million gift, one of the largest in the university’s history, from the Philip A. Zaffere Foundation for its new Owings Mills campus library.

The new 55,000-square-foot library will be named in honor of the late Philip A. Zaffere, an entrepreneur, inventor and food production engineer from the Eastern Shore. The facility will complement the Manning Academic Center and School of Design at Stevenson’s Owings Mill North campus location.

The university will break ground and begin site development on the new library this spring. In addition to library facilities, the complex will include a black box theater, a faculty commons with offices and a variety of gathering spaces for academic, social and cultural functions. The building will enhance Stevenson’s student experience on the Owings Mills campus by expanding research, study, and social spaces as well as foster collaborations between academic departments.

Zaffere was born in Federalsburg in 1930, and took over operations of his family’s bakery business during his college years. An outside-of-the-box thinker, Zaffere engineered food production methods and technologies that eventually took his family’s small company to a national level. He developed successful formulas for the mass production of baking crumbs and transformed his family’s company into Shoreman Food Technologies.

Under Zaffere’s leadership, Shoreman, which was ultimately sold to the PET Food Corporation in 1988, became the main supplier for nationwide brands such as Stove Top Stuffing and Mrs. Paul’s frozen foods. While the needs of his family’s business interrupted his own college studies, Zaffere maintained a deep and lifelong curiosity for the sciences and engineering as well as a commitment to supporting education and his community. He passed away in January 2016.