There is a moment, somewhere along Chocolate Avenue, when you stop noticing the smell. It takes a while. For the first hour in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the scent of cocoa hangs in the air so thickly that you catch yourself checking your pockets for a stray bar. Above the road, the streetlamps are shaped like Hershey’s Kisses, and at the junction of Chocolate and Cocoa Avenues they burn above traffic that seems in no particular hurry. This is a town about 100 miles west of Philadelphia that runs on chocolate. It was named after the man who made it, and it still behaves as though he might come round the corner at any moment.
I got there towards the end of September, a couple of weeks after the anniversary of Milton Snavely Hershey’s birth on September 13, 1857. Yes, his middle name was Snavely. That is one of the small, pleasing facts you pick up in Hershey. The bigger realisation arrives slowly: the chocolate bar is only half the story. The other half is what he did with the money.
First bite of chocolate
The Hershey Story, the museum on Chocolate Avenue, is a sensible place to begin. Its bricks are roughly the colour of a Hershey bar, which could be a coincidence but almost certainly isn’t. The building cost several million and opened in January 2009. It was built by the M.S. Hershey Foundation, the body Hershey set up to steer his fortune into good works, and it sits down the street from the factory he built to make chocolate for the masses.
The permanent galleries are upstairs, spread across he second floor and laid out as a timeline. The rooms run from Failures to Fortune through Sweet Innovations, The Power of Promotion and Hershey Builds Hershey, and end with A Living Legacy. The museum pitches itself at adults and children alike. On the afternoon I spent there, that turned out to be accurate: grandparents were reading the panels closely while their grandchildren tugged them towards anything with a button.
Failure, and then more failure
The first gallery is the most reassuring room in the building, particularly for anyone who has ever made a mess of something. Hershey’s route to success was bumpy. The gallery traces it through a series of recreated façades that you walk into and out of, like stepping between chapters.
It starts at the Hershey Homestead in Derry Church, which is what this patch of Pennsylvania was called before it became Hershey. His father tried one business after another, and the family moved often. Young Milton went to seven different schools and left in the fourth grade. His parents nonetheless encouraged him to chase his ambitions, and the exhibits make clear that the restlessness he inherited was not only a burden. After an apprenticeship he moved into sweets as a teenager.
All the chocolates you can buy at Hershey’s Chocolate World
The next facade recreates his first shop in Philadelphia, opened in 1876. It went bankrupt after four years. Another attempt in New York City in 1883 went the same way and earned him a reputation as something of a ne’er-do-well, much like his father.
Among the artefacts is a candy cabinet designed by Hershey’s father. Hershey spent heavily on developing and marketing these display boxes, and the venture left him bankrupt. It looks like a handsome piece of furniture. It is also the sort of object that makes you wince on someone else’s behalf.
The third facade opens into the office of the Lancaster Caramel Company. This is where the story turns. Hershey’s caramels caught the attention of a European candy importer, and he expanded into baking chocolate, cocoa and sweet chocolate coatings. Within a few years the man who had failed earlier was a millionaire.
The route ends at the chocolate factory in the town that bears his name. Standing in that last space, having walked through a couple of bankruptcies to get there, you understand why the museum sequences it this way. The adage about trying again could have been written for him.
The machine that roars
Sweet Innovations is the loudest room in the museum. Hershey did not invent chocolate. Cocoa had been around for centuries before he came along. What he changed was who got to eat it. At the time, milk chocolate was used mainly as a coating for other sweets and was treated as a luxury. Hershey worked on cheaper ways of making it and built a recipe around fresh milk, which was an unusual choice then. The result was a treat for everyone rather than an indulgence for the few.
The gallery traces the turning point to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a celebration of invention where Hershey bought his first chocolate-making machines. The museum calls it his “aha!” moment.
The centrepiece is a conche, the machine that mixes chocolate. It is authentic factory equipment. Every so often it comes to life with a roar and a rumble, and every child within range stops to look. It is surrounded by panels explaining how chocolate is made and by archival film of the Hershey factory in the 1930s. The film shows rows of workers, glinting machinery and a scale of production that would have been hard to imagine in the Philadelphia shop.
Close by is a working machine for wrapping Hershey’s Kisses. Two self-taught brothers at the factory engineered it. Before that, from 1907 to 1921, every Kiss was wrapped by hand.
The room closes with something I had not expected: everything Hershey made from what was left over. Chocolate-making byproducts became cocoa butter soap and cocoa shell mulch. For a time the company also made chewing gum. The frugal side of the man shows here. Nothing was wasted if it could be sold.
Selling to everyone
Hershey built one of the most recognisable food brands in America without ever advertising on the radio. He believed in point-of-purchase advertising: posters, displays and packaging that caught a customer’s eye at the counter where the decision was being made.
The museum holds an extensive collection of this material. There is product packaging from Hershey’s confectionery businesses dating back to 1886, posters, point-of-purchase displays and several hundred confectionery moulds. Walking past it is like watching a brand take shape one wrapper at a time.
The formula behind all this was simple. Hershey developed a straightforward way of making chocolate and stayed with it. The 5-cent Hershey bar was within reach of ordinary people, and ordinary people bought it in enormous numbers. Visitors to the town bought it too. Hershey never tried to keep tourists away. He was a businessman first, and a visitor was also a customer.
That reach has lasted. The company that grew from the factory now makes Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, names familiar well beyond Pennsylvania. The scale was evident early. After Hershey moved his cocoa business from Lancaster back to his birthplace in the early 1900s, the modest factory became the largest chocolate-manufacturing plant in the world. In the gift shops, people bought wrappers, souvenir tins and Kiss-shaped everything. The brand is still doing what its founder designed it to do.
Building a town, not just a factory
Hershey Builds Hershey is the gallery where the story widens from a man to a place.
He chose the site for practical reasons: it was close to dairy farms for the milk, it had land available and it had good rail links. He also chose it for sentimental ones, because it was where he was born. The factory went up on farmland. Around it he built workers’ homes and, later, an amusement park. For nearly 40 years he worked at making the place a gracious, enriching and congenial home for his employees, for tourists and for himself.
The exhibits trace the town’s architecture, much of which drew on the travels of Milton and his wife, Catherine, whom he called Kitty. They also cover the Hershey mansion, life inside the factory and Hersheypark, along with the other attractions that led the town to call itself the Sweetest Place on Earth.
The personal belongings of the Hersheys are on display too, and they are what I lingered over longest. There is also a cancelled cheque made out to the White Star Line. Hershey had booked passage on the RMS Titanic, but business matters forced him to leave Europe early on another ship. The cheque is a small slip of paper, and a heavy one.
The Hersheys had no children. Kitty could not have them, and she died in 1915 at the age of 44. The museum does not dwell on this, but it explains much of what follows.
The school that became his heirs
If there is a single idea visitors carry out of the Hershey Story, it is in the final gallery, A Living Legacy. As a young man, Hershey wrote down a belief that a person is only as happy as the happiness he brings to others.
Unable to have children of their own, Milton and Kitty started the Hershey Industrial School for orphan boys. Today it is the Milton Hershey School, a coeducational institution for children. The museum calls it perhaps his most enduring legacy. In 1918 Hershey gave his entire stake in the chocolate company to the trust that supports the school. It was a remarkable thing for any businessman to do, and it is the fact that reframes everything you have seen upstairs.
Hershey's Chocolate World, You can make a personalised chocolate bar at Hershey’s Chocolate World
The M.S. Hershey Foundation has supported educational and cultural opportunities since 1935. Displays cover Hershey’s support for public schools and his gifts to local churches in the depths of the Depression. They also cover the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, established after his death but in keeping with his concern for the community’s wellbeing.
There is also a newer interactive experience in which visitors discover more than 30 stories about Hershey, each told in a fresh way. Together they sketch a man of contradictions: frugal but generous, a risk-taker but practical. It ends by asking visitors what motivates them. It is not a question you expect from a chocolate museum, and several people around me paused over it longer than they had over the conche.
Hershey died in 1945, aged 88. He did not keep a journal and was, by most accounts, a private and unassuming man. People in town still call him “Mr Hershey”.
A collector of other people’s histories
One quieter part of the museum surprised me. The Hershey Story holds more than Hershey. In 1933 Hershey bought a collection of American Indian items for the newly created Hershey American Indian Museum. Two years later he turned to his own heritage. His parents, natives of central Pennsylvania, were both of Pennsylvania German descent. He bought a wide-ranging collection from the estate of George H. Danner, a merchant and collector from Manheim who had shown it to visitors on the third floor of his dry goods store.
The Danner collection documents daily life among 19th-century Pennsylvania Germans. It includes everyday household objects, about 2,000 pieces of English ceramics, glassware and textiles. Its highlights include a John Flory blanket chest, a John Long lamp, Lehnware cups and saffron boxes, an inlaid wardrobe from 1768 and a coverlet made for Danner’s mother. The collection is too large and some pieces too fragile to show all at once, so objects rotate in and out of controlled storage. The museum began accepting Hershey-related artefacts shortly after his death, and those have since become the heart of the collection. The collection also covers Hershey’s non-chocolate ventures, such as the Hershey Estates Dairy and the Hershey Transit Company, along with decades of Hersheypark souvenirs.
Tasting the world, making your own
Hershey is not a place where you are allowed to stay a spectator for long.
On the museum’s ground floor, the Tastings counter serves warm drinking chocolates made from single-source beans, each grown in one region of the world. The line-up spans Mexico, Venezuela, Ghana, Tanzania and Indonesia. Each has a different percentage of cacao and a flavour shaped by the climate, rainfall and vegetation where it grew. Tasting them side by side is a small education in itself, and it makes the point that Hershey’s Milk Chocolate draws on beans from many parts of the world. The children are not left out. While parents work through the exotic cups, the young ones get a mug of warm milk and a chocolate stirring lolly that turns it into hot cocoa. Judging by the faces around me, the children had the better deal.
The Chocolate Lab upstairs is where the museum’s promise to entertain both adults and children is most visibly kept.
Chocolate World, and the sweetest place on earth
A short distance away, Hershey’s Chocolate World is where the brand meets its public head on. If the museum is where you learn how Hershey became Hershey, Chocolate World is where you see how much people still love it. There are shelves of familiar wrappers, families posing with Kisses bigger than their children, and an unmistakable holiday mood. Chocolate is the draw, but the real product on sale is a feeling many visitors seem to have carried since childhood.
The same spirit runs through the rest of the town. Hersheypark has roller coasters for those who like to hurtle downhill. Hershey Gardens has a butterfly conservatory for those who prefer something gentler. The town is clean, well lit and easy to get around, and it is welcoming to families above all. It has been described as a less overwhelming alternative to a Disney theme park, and on a late-September weekday, with the summer crowds gone, it certainly felt that way.
What the chocolate pays for
It would be easy to leave Hershey having treated it as a sugar-coated day out. Most visitors probably do, and there is nothing wrong with that. Hershey sold joy by the bar and would presumably have been delighted to see a queue at the tasting counter.
The museum, though, keeps pulling you back to a simpler idea. A man who failed at first, who left school in the fourth grade and who had no children of his own chose to make other people’s children his heirs. The chocolate bought the school. The school, in a sense, is what the chocolate is for. The town, with its Kiss-shaped lamps, its streets named after cocoa and its factory still at the centre of things, is the setting he built around both.
Hershey is a holdout from an older America, when towns grew up around a single mine, mill or factory. Many of those towns have faded as industries moved or mechanised. This one has not. When I walked back along Chocolate Avenue in the early evening, the lamps were coming on, the air still smelt of cocoa and a family ahead of me was arguing happily over who had eaten the last Kiss. I had long since stopped noticing the smell. The feeling that someone had planned all of this, and planned it kindly, stayed with me.
The reporter was in Philadelphia and the surrounding area on an invitation from Brand USA, which provided travel and accommodation