Milton Hershey and the Town He Built

Milton Hershey had failed twice before he succeeded. His first candy company in Philadelphia went bankrupt. His second, in New York, went bankrupt. In eighteen eighty-six, at the age of twenty-nine, he returned to Lancaster County where he had grown up and tried again, this time making caramel. The Lancaster Caramel Company eventually sold for one million dollars, which was enough to build the chocolate factory that made him a wealthy man.

In nineteen oh three, Hershey built his chocolate factory in the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch farmland, in Derry Township, a place that had no town. Then he built the town around it.

What he built was deliberately different from the company towns that were reshaping industrial America. At Carnegie's Homestead or Pullman's model town in Illinois, the company owned everything and extracted rent alongside wages. Hershey's workers could own their homes. There was a streetcar system, a park with a carousel, a school for orphan boys endowed with most of Hershey's personal fortune, a hotel built during the Depression because Hershey refused to lay off workers in a downturn and needed something to build.

When the Depression arrived, Hershey did what no other major industrialist had done: he intensified construction rather than cutting his workforce. He built the Hotel Hershey, the community sports arena, and a new school building between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-five; the Hotel Hershey project alone is documented as employing roughly eight hundred workers, during the worst economic contraction in American history.

The legacy carries a complication that Hershey himself either could not see or chose not to address. His workforce was entirely white until the civil rights era. The town he built as a model of industrial benevolence practiced the same racial exclusion as every other institution in mid-century Pennsylvania. The orphan school he endowed did not admit Black students until nineteen sixty-eight.

The chocolate is still made in Hershey. The park is still running. The school for children in need is now one of the wealthiest private educational institutions in the United States.