Milton S. Hershey

Milton S. Hershey: The Candy Man Who Built a Town

A man who never finished the fourth grade would go on to reinvent an industrial process, found a company that still bears his name, and then give away his entire fortune to educate other people's children. Milton Hershey's story is less a rags-to-riches tale than a study in the discipline of failing productively — he failed at candy three times before he succeeded once, spectacularly.

A Mennonite Boyhood of Work and Hardship

Milton Snavely Hershey was born September 13, 1857, in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, to Henry and Veronica "Fanny" Hershey, a Mennonite farming family of Swiss and German descent who spoke Pennsylvania Dutch at home. His father drifted between business schemes while his mother held the household together; the family moved often, and Milton's schooling stopped at fourth grade. His sister Sarena died at age four, leaving Milton essentially an only child. It was, by the account of the school that now bears his name, a childhood of "work and hardship," and it produced in him a tolerance for risk that more comfortable upbringings rarely do.

Learning Candy From the Bottom Up

At fourteen, Milton's mother arranged an apprenticeship with printer Sam Ernst, which did not take. She then placed him with confectioner Joseph Royer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where for four years he swept floors and learned the candy trade from the ground up. In 1876, at nineteen, he opened his own candy shop in Philadelphia to coincide with the Centennial Exposition — and failed. He tried again in Denver, then New Orleans, then Chicago, then New York, chasing techniques in caramel-making and chocolate production and going broke more than once. Each failure taught him something about ingredients, machinery, or markets that the last one hadn't.

The Caramel Fortune

Hershey's persistence paid off when he returned to Lancaster in 1883 and started the Lancaster Caramel Company, using fresh milk in his caramels — a technique that set his product apart and made it sell. The company grew fast: by the early 1890s it employed more than 1,300 workers across two plants. Then, at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Hershey watched German chocolate-making machinery in action and became fixated on chocolate instead of caramel. He sold the Lancaster Caramel Company for a reported one million dollars and, rather than retire on the proceeds, poured them into a business making a product he had no proven way to mass-produce affordably.

Betting Everything on Milk Chocolate

Milk chocolate at the time was a Swiss luxury good, made in small batches and priced accordingly. Hershey's gamble — in the words of the institution he founded, he "decided to risk everything on milk chocolate" — was to work out a formula and a manufacturing process that could turn it into a nickel candy bar sold by the millions. He built his new factory not in an existing city but on farmland near his birthplace in Derry Township, betting that proximity to dairy country and cheap land mattered more than proximity to markets. The first Hershey bars went on sale in 1900; Hershey's Kisses followed in 1907, the almond bar in 1908. The gamble worked, and worked at a scale nobody in the confectionery trade had attempted before.

Building a Company Town

The factory's success forced a second, stranger project: Hershey had to build an entire town to house and hold his workforce, since nothing existed nearby. What began as farmland thirty miles northwest of Lancaster grew into homes, churches, schools, a trolley system, a park, and eventually a hotel — the planned community that became Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was industrial paternalism on a scale usually associated with company towns of dubious reputation, but Hershey's version came with parks and a zoo rather than scrip and debt peonage, and the town has outlived the century in reasonably good health.

Giving It All Away

In 1898 Hershey had married Catherine "Kitty" Sweeney, an Irish-American Catholic from Jamestown, New York; the couple had no children, and Kitty died in 1915 of an illness that went undiagnosed. In 1909, the couple had already signed a deed of trust establishing the Hershey Industrial School, originally intended for local orphan boys — the institution now known as the Milton Hershey School. Then, in 1918, three years after his wife's death and with no children of his own to inherit, Hershey transferred majority ownership of the Hershey Chocolate Company into the school's trust — effectively signing over his life's work to educate other people's orphaned and disadvantaged children. The gift was kept private until 1923. The Trust still holds controlling shares in the Hershey Company today, along with Hersheypark and the Hotel Hershey, and by the 2010s the school was educating roughly 2,000 students at a time, tuition-free. A 1935 foundation added a museum, gardens, and theater; a 1963 gift of $50 million built the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

War Rations and Wartime Production

During the Second World War, Hershey's company became a quartermaster's supplier, producing the Ration D bar and later the Tropical Chocolate Bar to strict military specifications — heat-resistant above 90°F and deliberately bland, so soldiers would carry it as emergency calories rather than eat it for pleasure. An estimated three billion of these bars were produced between 1940 and 1945; by war's end the plant was turning out 24 million bars a week and had earned five Army-Navy "E" Production Awards.

Why Milton Is Called a Genius

Calling Hershey a "genius" stretches the word past its usual meaning of raw intellectual brilliance — nothing in his record suggests an unusual analytical mind, and his formal education stopped at nine or ten years old. What he had instead was an unusually productive relationship with failure: three collapsed candy businesses in three different cities before he found the formula, in both senses, that worked. His real innovation was industrial rather than conceptual — figuring out how to manufacture a fresh-milk product at a scale and price point (the nickel bar) that had never been attempted, then reasoning correctly that doing so required building an entire supporting town rather than waiting for one to exist. That is a genius of applied persistence and operational imagination, closer to an engineer's than a scientist's, and it is compounded by a philanthropic decision — giving away a fortune with no heirs to object — that had nothing to do with cleverness and everything to do with character. Sources describing him use words like "resilience," "risk-taking," and "vision" rather than "genius" outright; the label, where it appears in popular usage, rests more on the scale of what he built from a fourth-grade education than on any singular insight.

Legacy

Hershey died of pneumonia on October 13, 1945, at eighty-eight, and is buried beside his wife in the cemetery he built. His statue at the Milton Hershey School shows him with an orphan boy, under the inscription "His deeds are his monument. His life is our inspiration." The company, the town, the school, and the medical center all still operate, funded by an inheritance he arranged to have no children to inherit.

Achievements

• Candy Hall of Fame — 1972
• Affiliated with The Hershey Company and Lancaster Caramel Company