What Was Here Before: Hershey, Pennsylvania

You're standing in the lower Susquehanna country, homeland of the Susquehannock people, who hunted and farmed along these river valleys until disease and warfare shattered their nation. The township, called Derry, was organized in seventeen twenty-nine, and its early settlers were mostly Scots-Irish and German. For nearly two centuries this was ordinary Pennsylvania farm country, limestone fields and small homesteads.

Then Milton Hershey came home. Born nearby in eighteen fifty-seven, he had already made and lost one candy fortune before cracking the formula for affordable milk chocolate. In nineteen oh three he chose these same farmfields as the site for his new factory, because fresh milk and a cooperative population were close at hand. He didn't just build a plant. He built a town, laying out streets named Cocoa Avenue and Chocolate Avenue, erecting schools and a trolley line and parks, creating a kind of gilded paternalism where workers traded some independence for genuine security. The Milton Hershey School, founded in nineteen oh nine, still educates thousands of lower-income children today. The farm village is now the self-styled sweetest place on earth.