The Milton Hershey Story

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for The American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or to Apple Podcasts.

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An American candy store in 1900 looked very different than it does today. Candy was a special treat, sold almost exclusively in candy stores. Customers didn’t touch the merchandise. Store clerks did. The clerks put the candy into bags, one small piece at a time. The many varieties of candy included butterscotch, toffee, caramel, molasses, candy, taffy, and hard candy made from boiled sugar in dozens of flavors and colors. Even though there was plenty of sweets to choose from, Milton Hershey knew the one thing that was missing: chocolate.

Chocolate was sold in.

Europe. And only a few affluent Americans had ever even tried it. Here to tell the story is Don Pepsen, the President and Executive Director at the M.S. Hershey Foundation, and Amy Ziggler, Senior Director of The Hershey Story Museum. Here’s Amy and Don with the story of Milton Hershey.

He was actually born in a little crossroads called Hawkersville, which has now sort of been enveloped by what is Hershey, and his mother was a fairly strict Mennonite woman, and his father was kind of a dreamer and always had big plans, was constantly moving them around from place to place because he was trying out new jobs. He was never afraid to take a risk, but unfortunately that resulted in his family having a very kind of jointed life. Milton Hershey attended eight or nine different one-room schoolhouses over the course of six years, and he said that he only had the equivalent of a fourth-grade education, so it was a difficult time for him. He had a younger sister named Serena, who was born when he was six years old, and she died when he was ten at the age of four, and so his parents, who already had kind of a strained relationship because of their really different personalities, stopped while. He became an apprentice when he was fourteen, and at that point, his father moved out, and they never lived together again.

His parents.

His first job was actually an apprenticeship that Henry, his father, secured for him, working for a German newspaper, and I think that he got him that job because it was something that he would have liked to have done. Henry was big into reading, loved education, love reading about the news and learning new things, and Milton really did not like that work. It’s always been said that he threw his hat into the printing press and tried to make it look like an accident so that he could get fired, which he did very quickly.

He did not work there.

For very long. So it was then that his mother signed him up to be an apprentice with a confectioner in nearby Leicester County, and that’s where he learned how to make candy between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, which I find interesting because she was very focused on hard work and learning a skill, and she wanted to also, though, make sure that he learned how to do something that he would enjoy and not force him into a job that wasn’t something that was meant for him or right for him, which is kind of what his father did.

At that point.

Milk chocolate was not something that you could just walk into a store and buy. The only chocolate that you could really get around here was dark chocolate, and it was usually covering another kind of candy, so he learned how to make all different kinds of candies, not chocolate.

At that point.

So when he started working there, he would often work the front counter. When customers came, he would take care of their horses and pitch them up outside and do things like that. And his mother was kind of disappointed because she didn’t think that that was going to give him the experience that he needed to move on and be successful at something. And so she actually went to the man he was apprenticing with and paid him a little bit extra so that he would teach him more of the behind-the-scenes work and recipes and candy-making and things like that.

What Mr. Hershey did in the confectionery apprenticeship was learn the craft and the art of candy-making. And as anyone knows who has made candy, temperatures where things boil, temperature where a thing his crystallizes, all those kinds of technical chemistries of candy-making come back to help him over and over again in the next thirty years.

Without that basic.

Knowledge that he gained with the Roric Candy Shop and ice cream rie, he would have never achieved what he achieved.

Later on, when he was eighteen, his apprenticeship was over, and he decided to go to Philadelphia to open a candy shop in 1876. And.

He started making lots and.

Lots of different kinds of penny candies and selling them from a cart on the street. And at this time, he had some help from his mother and his aunt, Aunt Maddie, and their family had some money, but his father was not very helpful with financing anything. He was working very, very hard. He was making candy at night; he was selling it during the day. It was exhausting, and he was really struggling financially. And we actually have some letters that he wrote home to his uncle asking for money, and we actually have some that were written, like more than one a day that he was sending, saying, “I just need some help, you know, to pay rent and things like that.”

So it was a very stressful time.

He did have some success in the beginning, but then the money stopped his you.

Know, stopped giving him money.

His father came to town, and they developed a candy-display case that they patented that sort of looked like it was always full, and then you could pull drawers out of the back and sell bulk candy, penny candy that way. That was an expensive endeavor, and when his father left Philadelphia to move to Denver, Colorado, he bought him out of that little business, and he ended up very soon after filing bankruptcy. So he lost his business in Philadelphia and decided to travel around and learn more about candy-making. So he went to New Orleans. He went to Chicago. He learned how to make carmels in Denver, and that was kind of a big turning point.

And you’ve been listening to Don Pepsen and Amy Ziggler tell the story of Milton Hershey and the relentlessness of this guy—the learning that takes place from failure (and that’s what we learn), the relentlessness to pursue excellence in your trade, which doesn’t happen in a year or three or five. It’s 10 and 20. And that’s the journey this man takes. Then he gets that big order from Europe from his carmel company, and you would think guys would stop then, but no! What is he doing? He wants more, and he shows up at that Columbian Exposition in 1893, and he sees chocolate. This kind of ambition is so much at the root of what we know about the American dream and the American experiment. When we come back, more of Milton Hershey’s story, a remarkable one here on Our American Stories.

And we continue with Our American Stories. And in that last segment, we learned that many of the family members had sort of given up on them, and a whole bunch of people thought he was, well, just crazy. And to be an entrepreneur is to be just a little crazy. Now, more of Milton Hershey’s story.

So Milnersey went to Colorado, Denver, because his father was there, and he got a job with a man who was making carmels using fresh milk, which was very different from what most people were doing at the time, which was using paraffin, and the fresh milk actually helped it stay stable longer, so it kept. It had a good mouthfeel and texture, and it made the flavor better. And Milton Hershey really latched onto that way of doing things. So when he started his caramel company, he also was using fresh milk to make carmels, and then in turn, when he switched over to experimenting with milk chocolate, he was using fresh milk in his milk chocolate, which is something that most people were also not doing, so that was a real turning point.

I think one of the interesting things about Milton Hershey during this entire period is Milton’s mother’s family was comparing Milton to Milton Hershey’s father. And so they thought that Milton was all over the place, was a little too entrepreneurial. But through all of these ventures that had just been described, Milton Hershey gained so much knowledge about experimentation, about entrepreneurship, about all these kinds of things that literally went into his repository of knowledge that.

He was going to use later. And so I think what.

You have here is this incredible contrast between Mrs. Hershey, Fannie’s, determination, discipline, regimen, and Mr. Hershey’s kind of experimentation about entrepreneurship and other things.

And so Milton got the best of both parents.

It’s interesting because they did see him as being a little all over the place, and people told him a lot of times in his life that he was crazy. But what he had was the follow-through that his father never did. Because he was really pro taking risk and making big life changes. But when it didn’t work out, he didn’t just turn around and, you know, try something else. He kind of followed it through and did everything he could to make it happen. So his aunt Mattie loaned him money to start up his first business in Philadelphia, and we have an original sales catalog from that business, and there’s probably 75 different items that he was making. So it was a very, very different kind of product list than what he ended up doing when he became really successful.

So he was there for about six.

Years, and she loaned him money several times during those six years. By the time he left Philadelphia and ended up having to declare bankruptcy, they weren’t really bankrolling him anymore after that. So he was moving around, and he actually worked for other people.

In those locations.

When he went to New Orleans and Chicago, he wasn’t sort of doing his own business. He was working for other people and learning more about it. When he came back to Lancaster after his New York business failed, he literally couldn’t afford to pay the freight to get his candy-making machinery and equipment out of the train station.

He had to borrow more money.

This time he borrowed it from a friend, not his family, and that’s how he was able to start the Lancaster Carmel Company. So this is when they were really starting to get concerned that he was turning out to be like his father, and he wanted to start yet another business, and so he borrowed money from a friend, and he rented some space, and that’s when he started to focus really on carmels. Before that, as I mentioned, he had always been making lots of different kinds of candies and not really focusing on a single product. And so when he was in Denver, he learned a lot about how to make caramels with fresh milk, and he decided that that’s what he was going to focus on. So he started the Lancaster Caramel Company in 1886, and he started to make caramels that were coated in dark chocolate that became very popular.

That’s when he really started to take off.

There was a businessman from England who was traveling through Lancaster, and he stopped and tasted the carmels that Milton was selling, and he ordered a very, very large quantity of them to be shipped over to England. And so he was able to go to a bank, show them this order, and borrow money because he didn’t have enough money to buy all the ingredients that he was going to need to make them.

And so he was able to get some more money.

And that’s what sort of was the thing that really kicked off his success.

When he was in Lancaster, Milton Hershey had a number of pivotal points in his entire candy-making career, and one of the ones that is told over and over again is when the family Snavely money had dried up, no one was taking him seriously anymore.

He finally gets to the.

Point where he has this large order in hand from England. The only reason he was able to finance the purchasing of the ingredients for that order was because the cashier at the Lancaster bank, Mr. Brennaman, decided to co-sign the loan agreement, and without that, he personally co-signed the loan agreement, and without that, he would not have gotten the bank loan that he needed to basically take his business and create a carmel business that became the number one carmel.

Business in America.

So the reason that Mr. Brennaman was so apt to be able to be a co-signer of the loan agreement was because he had tasted the carmels and visited the factory in Lecaster, and he was impressed with not only the taste of the carmels, but he was also very, very impressed with the productivity of the factory.

By 1894, he had over 1,300 people working for him. He eventually had caramel plants in Mountjoy and Writing, Pennsylvania. He had a sales office and a plant outside of Chicago, and he also had the one in Leicaster. So he was doing really well and was selling carmels across the country at that point. So it’s pretty fast when you look at all of the struggle that went into getting back to Lancaster and starting over again with carmels. This was a pretty fast rise to success, and he eventually went on to become one of the most successful businessmen in Lancaster.

Another pivotal moment in Mr. Hershey’s life is his visit to the Columbian Exposition in 1893. So Mr. Hershey by that time had a western branch of his carmel company, which was near Chicago, and he decided that he would stop into the Columbian Exposition, which has been heralded as the turning point for so many things that we know today as common in our homes. So, first, electrical light bulbs all over the Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and all kinds of things like that—new machinery, new combines, all kinds of things. But Mr. Hershey is enamored with the chocolate display by a chocolate machine manufacturer, that is the Lehman Company, and so he’s walking through the exhibits, and he is just incredibly overwhelmed with this chocolate display. And I have to admit, from the descriptions that we have, this chocolate display was incredibly impressive. It was an entire front of a house that looked like chocolate. And so he purchases some of the floor equipment and sends it back to Lancaster ear so he can start his experimentation. And by 1896, he then establishes a division of the Lancaster Carmel Company, which is a Hershey Chocolate Company, a subsidiary of that Carmel company.