Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Pennsylvania: The Sweet History of Hershey with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

In this solo episode, Sharon sets her sights on the sweet life of Milton S. Hershey and his innovation in the world of chocolate. Today, the Hershey Company produces over a billion pounds of chocolate each year, but its origins are much more humble. Milton Hershey, armed with only four years of elementary education, spent decades learning and honing his chocolate-making craft. His hard work and business acumen led to the company’s rapid success, as well as the growth of an entire town and tourist destination. Hershey is one of the most recognizable and most philanthropic companies in the nation, and it all began on farmland in rural Pennsylvania. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome, welcome, always delighted to have you along and I have a very sweet story for you today. And I mean that literally, very sweet story about the state of Pennsylvania. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I bet you have heard of the Hershey chocolate company. I bet you've had a Hershey's kiss, right? I bet you have, or a Hershey bar. I bet you've had s'mores and you know that I could not let the opportunity go by to talk about Milton S. Hershey. The Hershey Company produces over a billion pounds of chocolate

every year. One billion with a B. That is a lot of chocolate. By the way, S stands for Snavely, Milton Snavely Hershey. Snavely was his mother's maiden name, by the way. He was born in 1857 to his parents who were named Henry and Veronica. Veronica went by the nickname Fanny. And Milton was mostly an only child. He did have a younger sister who died when she was a toddler, but he was raised most of his life as an only child. And the Hershey's were part of the Mennonite community in the state of Pennsylvania. So Milton grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. And Mennonites are Anabaptists. Anabaptism grew out of the Protestant Reformation. If you look back at the history of their religion, we start with early Christianity

under the Roman Empire, etc. And then the 11th century, we have the Great Schism that sort of separates the Orthodox Church from the Catholic Church. And then in the 16th century, we have the Protestant Reformation. And out of the Protestant Reformation, we have groups like Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Anabaptism. And some other Anabaptist groups you might be familiar with are groups like the Amish. And I already mentioned the Mennonites, Hutterite communities, and there are a number of other Anabaptist groups. And Milton Hershey grew up under one of them. Mennonites do have unique

practices to themselves, but the Mennonite community he grew up in was not like what you think of when you're thinking of an Amish community where they live in more insulated communities. The Mennonite group that he grew up in interacted with the public at large, et cetera. So he did, however, grow up not speaking English very well. And he did not attend very much school. He started school at age six and he left after fourth grade. So that left him with about four years of education. And that had a significant impact on Milton Hershey's later life. When he was 14, he got an apprenticeship

at a local printer, and he was helping to print a German-English newspaper. He did not enjoy it. One day, he accidentally dropped his hat into one of the machines, and then he ended up getting fired. And his parents were probably not very happy. You know, like that was your chance at having a career and then to get fired. That was a significant blow, but they helped him find a new apprenticeship. And this is one of those great moments in time where you can look back and see, had Milton Hershey not dropped his hat into the printing machine, we would not have s'mores. Okay, maybe that's a leap. Maybe that's a leap. But if he had not dropped his hat into the printing machine, he would not have gotten fired. And then he would not have gotten a new apprenticeship with a candy maker. He got an apprenticeship that his parents helped

arrange for him with a candy maker in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. By the way, my team and I had a big debate about how to pronounce the word L-A-N-C-A-S-T-E-R. It looks like Lancaster. And that's absolutely how people in the Midwest would say it, Lancaster. But then when I moved to the mid-Atlantic, I noticed that people did not say Lancaster. They said like Lancaster. And so I then asked somebody who lived in New York, how do you say it? And then she asked somebody who's from there, how do you say it? And then I did a bunch of research and I watched videos of how people say it. And the way locals pronounce it, it's almost like if you were to spell it L-A-N-G-K-I-S-S-T-E-R, Lancaster. So there you go. Don't write to me and be like,

it's Lancaster. That's not how they say it there. He got an apprenticeship working for a candy maker, and he spent the next four years learning the art of candy making, the art of confectionerism. That's not a word. So Milton then spent the next four years learning the art of confections and candy making. And in 1876, when he was 19 years old, he moved to Philadelphia to start his own confectionery business. Imagine, imagine being a 19-year-old who did not grow up speaking English, who only had four years of education, who was like, I am starting my own business in Philadelphia. So this was 100 years after 1776. Here comes Milton Hershey in Pennsylvania, making his mark in a different way. So over the next seven years, he traveled to a

bunch of larger cities. He went to New Orleans, Chicago, New York City, and he did more training, perfecting his craft. And in 1883, he returned to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and borrowed money from a bank to form the Lancaster Caramel Company. And he was a success. He honed his craft. He sold his caramels in bulk. And in a couple of years, he had paid off his bank loan and was able to grow his company to two factories. And he had over 1,300 employees. Y'all, that is a lot of employees. 1,300 employees in a couple of years of starting your business. That is incredible. By the way,

if you listened to my episode about the state of Illinois and about the World's Columbian Exposition, which I am moderately obsessed with, in fact, we're reading one of the books about the World's Columbian Exposition in my book club called The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. By the way, did you know I have a book club? I do. Governor Book Club. And so in 1893, Milton Hershey attended the World's Columbian Exposition. And he was fascinated as an attendee to see a German chocolate making machinery exhibit. And he was determined to return home and purchase chocolate making equipment. And he goes home and begins making plans. It took him seven years past that time to finally decide to sell the caramel business. By the way, do you say caramel or caramel? There is a second A there. Caramel, caramel. He decided to sell his business so he could take the leap into chocolate.

So he sold, in 1900, he sold his caramel business for $1 million, which is about $31 million in today's money. Not too shabby a result from a person of his generation, a person of his education level. Pretty impressive. This is what I find fascinating. He was not like, cool, I got $31 million. Let me retire. No. Guess what he did with the money? He began purchasing large amounts of dairy farm acreage. He bought about 30 acres of land because he wanted to explore this idea of like, I'm going to make my own formula for making milk chocolate because milk chocolate was a luxury product at the time. It was not widely available. Now, if you're a chocolate connoisseur, I guarantee you, if you're a chocolate connoisseur, you're all about like, ooh, all the different types of dark chocolate, 70% dark. What about beans from here and there

and everywhere, right? Like that is the luxury chocolate brand now is dark chocolate. But at the time, milk chocolate was like, wow, amazing. And so he began the Hershey Chocolate Company. He created his first bar of chocolate in 1900. Hershey's Kisses were introduced in 1907. And then he began making the Hershey bars with almonds in them in 1908. Those are my favorites, by the way. I like the ones with almonds. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies,

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You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. your podcasts. Going back in time a little bit to 1903, he began construction on what was to become the world's largest chocolate manufacturing factory. So he begins using fresh milk from the dairy farms. He begins using the latest technology to mass produce the chocolate. And then he continued furthering his expertise because remember, he had spent years and years and years working in the confectionery industry prior to ever launching anything of his own. And so he did have this base of knowledge to draw from, and he was continuously working to

improve his chocolate formula. Hershey chocolate became the first nationally marketed product of its kind, and it was wildly, wildly successful. This is something that he said about it. I believed that if I put a chocolate on the market that was better than anyone else was making or was likely to make and keep it absolutely uniform in quality, the time would come when the public would appreciate it and buy it. And so that is him being visionary enough to play the long game. Not if I sell a million chocolate bars, then I'll retire rich. But if I put it on the market and it's better than any other product, and I have a consistent quality, the time will come that people will buy it. I love that mindset. The time will come that people will buy it.

So at this point, Milton was in his 40s, and he was recently married. He married his wife, whose name was Catherine Sweeney. She went by the nickname Kitty. And she was also like an older bride. She was the ripe old age of 26, which today seems like that sounds like the right age to get married. And back then, it was like, well, what kind of old maid is this? Kitty also came from humble background. She grew up in Jamestown, New York, two Irish Catholic immigrant parents. And when

she and Milton got married, she quickly became very active in her community. She donated a lot of her time and money to the Lancaster Charity Society, which was a group that helped poor families in the community. Kitty and Milton were very happy together, and many people look back and credit Kitty with being a positive influence on Milton's charitable giving. She persuaded him to give his first documented gift of $5,000 to Franklin and Marshall College in 1900. She also saw to it that the Cathedral of St. Patrick in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania would get this big gift from Milton.

She is, in fact, listed as a founder on the plaque inside the front doors at the Cathedral of St. Patrick. They did not have any children, however. Kitty had a number of health problems. She had a degenerative disease, and it started limiting her mobility and balance. But the Hershey Company continued to grow and flourish, and they actively worked to spread that success and that wealth to the communities around them. One of Milton's beliefs was that employees deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. And also I found this unique to live in comfortable environments.

So as he expanded his chocolate factory in the early 1900s, he also began to build an entire community around it. He built this model town that included homes and a public transportation system and a public school system. Milton Hershey was building public schools. It had beautiful landscaping. Kitty was a very avid gardener. It had parks and lots of green space. And one of the things he was concerned about was providing adequate recreational opportunities for his employees. So he also built this huge park that opened on May 30th, 1906, and it continued to expand rapidly over the next number of years. It had a swimming pool. It had a ballroom. It had amusement park rides. And this

led to trolley cars and trains that helped thousands of out-of-town visitors travel to see this park that Milton Hershey had built and to see the chocolate factory and enjoy the beauty of the town that he and Kitty had envisioned and constructed. And so today we call this place Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the park and the ballroom and the swimming pool, et cetera, is now a genuine theme park. It's now called Hershey Park and it has like roller coasters and resorts and water slides. And it's now like a place people actually visit and vacation at. And one thing that I find interesting is that Hershey, Pennsylvania, of course, the name is very well known to people, but it's an unincorporated area. It's 14 miles east of

Harrisburg. It's in a township called Derry Township. It has no legal status. It's completely unincorporated, even though 14,000 people live there. All the services are provided by the township. I just thought that was a really interesting thing. Like why doesn't Hershey have its own like local government? I don't know the answer to that question. But in 1909, Milton and Kitty established a boarding school for orphan boys that today is known as the Milton Hershey School. It's arguably what Milton was most proud of in his life. It was built on 486 acres of farmland. And in 1910, it opened its doors to the first orphaned boys. There were four students in 1910. And by 1915, there were 60 boys who ranged in age from four to 18. Kitty died in 1915. And in 1918, three years after she died, Milton endowed the school's trust with almost all of his fortune, $60 million. In the 60s and 70s,

the school began to become more racially diverse. It allowed students of all races to attend. And in the 1970s, they began to admit female students. Today, the school has around 2,000 students that board their year-round tuition free. And the Milton Hershey School's endowment is worth, y'all, $15 billion today, about half of which comes from the school's controlling share of the Hershey Company stock. And so because of that, that makes it the wealthiest private K-12 school in the country. In 2020, the Milton Hershey School invested $350 million to fund the development of up to six free childhood resource centers in Pennsylvania. They were named the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning. Again, this just happened recently, and so they're still in process. They will serve kids

from birth to about age five, specifically kids who are economically disadvantaged and from at-risk backgrounds. I think that's just lovely. What a lovely thing to put your name on. I love that he took so much pride in the growth of his school, the town, and his business. He always placed the quality of his product and the well-being of his workers ahead of his profits. That was one of his things he was well known for. He said, we should deal with one another not as classes, but as persons, as brothers. The more closely we work together, the more effectively we can contribute to the better health of all mankind. This should be our common objective, and its achievement would make the world a happier place in which to live. He died of pneumonia in 1945 at Hershey Hospital. He was 88 years old. He's buried at Hershey Cemetery, a cemetery that he built next to his

wife, Kitty. I love that. I want to give you a couple little fun facts about the Hershey Company. I mentioned that Hershey Kisses hit the market in 1907, but nobody really knows why they were named that, why they were named Hershey Kisses. He never gave an explanation before he died. The most popular theory is that they were named for the sound that the chocolate makes as it was dropped onto the belt during the manufacturing. Just like a kind of sound, I would assume. I don't know. So while kisses were made by a machine going back to 1907, the machines that like wrapped them in foil and had the little paper tags in them, the little plume in the paper tags, that wasn't developed until 1921.

So between 1907 and 1921, people were hand wrapping Hershey kisses by hand. Imagine how much time that took to wrap each one of them, to make the little little plume thing stick up and wrap it by hand. That's so much work. Also, I got to share this with you. This is one of those things where I'm like, what? In 1912, Milton and Kitty had tickets to sail on the Titanic. They had tickets to sail on the Titanic. They ended up canceling their reservations at the very last minute because Milton had to attend to some pressing business matters. So later that year, they booked a trip on a different luxury liner, a German luxury liner called the SS America instead, and it was traveling between New York and Hamburg,

Germany. The America, by the way, was the ship that on April 14th, 1912, transmitted a wireless message about icebergs near the same area where the Titanic struck one and then sank. the Titanic struck one and then sank. Isn't that fascinating? I also loved this fun fact. Sam Hinkle, who was the chief chemist at the Hershey Chocolate Corporation, worked with representatives from the US Army in the 1930s to create ration bars that were high in calories, could withstand combat conditions and would taste only a little better than a boiled potato. The reason they didn't want them to taste too good is because they didn't want troops to be tempted to eat them too quickly. They didn't want people to be like, Hershey bars, and then just like gulp them all down. They needed to be edible,

but not that good. And also high in calories and could withstand combat conditions. So they came up with something called the field ration D-bars. So they were not a hit with soldiers, but they met the government specifications. And between 1941 and 1945, Hershey produced over 3 billion bars to give to combat soldiers during World War II. So in recognition of that, the military gave the Hershey Chocolate Company an award and presented them with a flag to fly above the chocolate plant and a lapel pin for all of the employees as a thank you for producing 3 billion of these field ration D bars. I also love this. After making the ration D bars, the Hershey company updated their formula to

create the Hershey's tropical chocolate bar. And they lasted up to an hour in 120 degree temperatures. And so those were given to soldiers who were going to be entering warmer climates. They didn't just turn into a pile of mush. And in 1971, those bars, the tropical chocolate bar, were on Apollo 15 with the astronauts visiting the moon. Isn't that, that is amazing. Like Milton Hershey out here making chocolate bars for the soldiers and the astronauts and the people of planet earth. And we now celebrate national chocolate day on September 13th because that was Milton Hershey's birthday. Isn't that fun? I just love that. I could go on and on. I could do a ton of episodes just on Milton Hershey, but that is my brief brain tingle that I wanted to give you about this incredibly unique American who went to four years of school

and then started making chocolate bars for astronauts. That's it for today, friends. I hope you enjoyed this. I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast

or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson,

edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.