Milton Hershey

Milton Snavely Hershey was born on September 13, 1857, on a farm in Derry Township in central Pennsylvania, to Henry Hershey and Veronica "Fanny" Snavely Hershey ^[1]. The family descended from Mennonite settlers who had farmed the region for generations, and his mother's plain, disciplined faith shaped the household far more than his father's restless schemes. Henry Hershey chased one speculative venture after another, from fruit farming to cough drop manufacturing, and the family moved repeatedly as each plan collapsed ^[2].

The constant relocation wrecked the boy's education. By most accounts Milton attended at least six different schools and left formal schooling for good around the fourth grade ^[1]. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a printer in the town of Gap, Pennsylvania, an arrangement that ended quickly and badly; one often repeated story holds that he dropped his hat into the press, though whether by accident or design is uncertain ^[2].

His mother then arranged a second apprenticeship, this one with Joseph Royer, a confectioner in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For four years, from 1872 to 1876, Hershey learned candy making, ice cream production, and the daily grind of running a sweets shop ^[1]. The trade suited him. Unlike printing, confectionery rewarded the patience and attention to ingredients that would define his later career.

In 1876, at eighteen, Hershey opened his own candy shop in Philadelphia, timed to catch the crowds attending the Centennial Exposition. He worked punishing hours making taffy and caramels by night and selling them by day, while his mother and his aunt Mattie Snavely helped wrap candy and stretch the budget ^[2]. The business limped along for six years before failing in 1882. Hershey then followed his father west to Denver, where he took a job with a local confectioner and learned a lesson that changed his fortunes: caramels made with fresh milk kept longer and tasted better than those made with paraffin ^[1].

Armed with that knowledge, he tried again in Chicago and then in New York City. Both ventures failed. By 1886 he was back in Lancaster, nearly broke, and reportedly snubbed by relatives who had tired of lending him money ^[2]. His aunt and a former employee, William "Lebbie" Lebkicher, stood by him, and Hershey began making milk caramels in a small rented space.

This time the product found its market. A large order from an English importer, financed by a loan from the Lancaster National Bank, put the Lancaster Caramel Company on solid footing ^[3]. The firm grew rapidly through the late 1880s and 1890s, eventually employing over a thousand workers across plants in Pennsylvania and Illinois and shipping its "Crystal A" caramels across the United States and abroad ^[1]. The serial failure of the previous decade had become one of the leading confectioners in the country.

The decisive moment in any Milton Hershey biography came at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he studied German chocolate making machinery on display. Convinced that chocolate, not caramel, was the future of American candy, he bought the equipment when the fair closed and installed it in Lancaster, founding the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1894 as a subsidiary that made chocolate coatings for his caramels along with novelties and cocoa ^[3].

Hershey is frequently quoted as declaring that caramels were only a fad and chocolate was permanent, and he acted on that conviction with startling finality. In 1900 he sold the Lancaster Caramel Company to the rival American Caramel Company for one million dollars, an enormous sum at the time, while keeping the chocolate business and the right to keep making chocolate ^[1]. He then spent years experimenting with milk, sugar, and cocoa to work out a formula for milk chocolate that could be produced at industrial scale. Swiss makers guarded their methods closely, so Hershey and a small crew ran trial after trial with condensed milk on his homestead until they arrived at a workable process ^[4].

The result was a milk chocolate bar that ordinary Americans could afford. Before Hershey, milk chocolate in the United States was largely an imported luxury; his methods of mass production and his focus on a few standardized products turned a five cent Hershey bar into an everyday purchase ^[3]. The flat-bottomed Hershey's Kiss, introduced in 1907, became one of the most recognizable candies in the world ^[4].

Rather than expand in Lancaster, Hershey returned to the dairy country of his birth. Derry Township offered abundant fresh milk from surrounding farms, clean water, and rail access, and in 1903 he broke ground there on what became the largest chocolate factory of its day, which opened in 1905 ^[3]. Around it he laid out a complete town, one of the more ambitious company towns in American history.

Hershey, Pennsylvania was designed to avoid the grim rowhouse model of many industrial settlements. The town offered comfortable brick homes that workers could buy, tree-lined streets named Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, a trolley system, a bank, schools, churches, a department store, and a free amusement park, Hersheypark, opened in 1906 for employees and their families ^[5]. Critics have noted the paternalism inherent in the arrangement, since Hershey controlled nearly every institution in town, but the standard of living he provided was unusually high for factory workers of the period ^[2].

The company itself prospered on a simple strategy: few products, made in enormous volume, sold at a fixed low price, with almost no advertising. Hershey believed the quality of the bar would market itself, and for decades the company spent essentially nothing on national advertising while still dominating American chocolate sales ^[4]. He also extended his operations abroad, building sugar mills, a town, and an electric railway in Cuba beginning in 1916 to secure his sugar supply, a settlement that was likewise named Hershey ^[1].

In 1898 Hershey married Catherine "Kitty" Sweeney, a young Irish Catholic woman from Jamestown, New York, whom he had met while she worked in a candy shop ^[2]. The marriage crossed religious lines that mattered in that era, and it surprised his Mennonite relatives, but by all accounts the couple were devoted to each other. They traveled widely and shared a growing concern for children in need, since they were unable to have children of their own.

That concern produced the decision for which Hershey is arguably best remembered. In 1909 Milton and Catherine signed the deed of trust creating the Hershey Industrial School, a home and school for orphaned boys, on the farmland where Milton had been born ^[6]. Catherine's health declined through the early 1910s from a progressive illness that gradually took her mobility, and she died on March 25, 1915, at age forty two ^[2]. Hershey never remarried and carried a photograph of her for the rest of his life.

One curious footnote among Milton Hershey facts: he and Catherine had placed a deposit toward passage on the Titanic for its April 1912 voyage, but business matters brought Hershey home earlier on another ship, and the couple never boarded ^[5]. The deposit check survives in the collection of The Hershey Story museum.

After Catherine's death, Hershey moved decisively to secure the school's future. In 1918, in an act kept quiet for years until a New York Times reporter uncovered it in 1923, he transferred the bulk of his fortune, including his controlling ownership of the chocolate company, then valued at roughly sixty million dollars, to the trust that supported the school ^[6]. Few American industrialists have given away so large a share of their wealth while still alive.

The Great Depression brought out the same instincts on a civic scale. Rather than lay off workers when demand fell, Hershey launched what came to be called the Great Building Campaign, employing hundreds of local men to construct the grand Hotel Hershey, the Hershey Theatre, a community building, a sports arena, and a new windowless factory office building during the 1930s ^[5]. He reportedly told a steam shovel operator to park the machine and hire more men with picks and shovels, a story that captures his attitude even if its details vary in the telling.

His final decade held some friction as well as honors. A sit-down strike at the chocolate plant in 1937 ended in violence when farmers and loyal workers forcibly ejected the strikers, a shock to a man who believed he had built a model industrial community; the plant unionized under a different union soon after ^[2]. During the Second World War the company produced the Field Ration D bar and later the Tropical Chocolate Bar for American troops, turning out millions of units and earning Army-Navy production awards ^[4]. Hershey stepped back from active management, resigning as chairman in 1944. He died of pneumonia at Hershey Hospital on October 13, 1945, one month after his eighty eighth birthday ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Milton Hershey usually gets two answers, the candy maker and the philanthropist, and the second may matter more. The Milton Hershey School, as the industrial school was renamed in 1951, evolved from a home for orphaned boys into a cost-free private school serving roughly two thousand boys and girls from families of low income, all funded by the trust Hershey created ^[6]. Through that trust, schoolchildren remain, in effect, the controlling beneficiaries of one of the largest confectionery companies in the world, an ownership arrangement with no real parallel in American business.

Among Milton Hershey achievements, historians usually rank the democratization of milk chocolate first. His production methods and pricing turned a European luxury into a mass market staple and shaped the American candy industry for the century that followed ^[3]. The town he founded grew into a tourist destination drawing millions of visitors each year to Hersheypark, the hotel, and the museum, while the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center of Pennsylvania State University, founded in 1963 with a fifty million dollar gift from the school trust, extended his name into medicine ^[5].

His reputation is not without complication. Biographers have examined the control he exercised over his town, the labor conflict of 1937, and the conditions on his Cuban sugar estates, and the school trust's governance has drawn scrutiny in recent decades ^[2]. Yet the core of the story holds: a man with a fourth grade education who failed repeatedly, built a fortune on a five cent chocolate bar, and quietly gave nearly all of it to children he would never meet.