![]() In the winter of 1867, at the age of four, Sarena caught scarlet fever and passed away. Money problems only fueled their arguments. Yet Fanny resented Henry for dragging the family into his get-rich-quick schemes. In Milton, Henry instilled the joy of never-ending experiments. Henry planted fruit trees and experimented with dams to stock fish. On the farm, Fanny raised the chickens, churned the butter, and sold the eggs. Sarena, the second child, was born in 1862. Fanny’s brothers set Henry up with a shoddy piece of farmland they owned, many miles from the rest of the family. When Fanny’s brothers learned that she was pregnant with her second child and their aloof degenerate of a brother-in-law was quickly running out of money, they made their way to the Oil Creek Valley and paid to bring Henry, Fanny, and Milton back to Lancaster. As Fanny and young Milton sheltered in a rented room, Henry went off in search of prospectors to invest his remaining cash in. Poor and unable to make a success of the farm, Henry sold it to pay off his debts and took his family and the money to the hellhole known as Oil City, Pennsylvania. The daughter of a bishop, she was born to wealth the Snavely family having grown up with the “Do the hard work” mentality of the Pennsylvania Dutch (also called Pennsylvania Deutsch, who were actually of German descent, not Dutch). Though he chased silver rushes and get-rich-quick schemes, he always wanted his son, Milton, to get an education, to fulfill his own failed dreams.įanny, Milton’s mother, did not share Henry’s enthusiasm for Milton’s education. But he was the kind of man who was late to his own wedding, arriving only to outshine his bride with striped pants, a silk vest, and fancy hat. Henry Hershey was a dreamer, had always wanted to be a writer, a painter, and a person of wealth. It was September 13, 1857, when on a homestead twenty miles north of Lancaster in the Lebanon Valley of Pennsylvania, Milton Snavely Hershey was born to Henry and Veronica “Fanny” Snavely Hershey. ![]() In the ensuing years, he changed the American palate, and in his wake, he left his name on a company, a city, and an orphanage. In 1900 he went all-in on milk chocolate, building a massive factory and utopian chocolate town on empty Pennsylvania farmland. If he had retired and spent his remaining years traveling the world with his wife, Catherine, one might never have known the name Hershey.īut Hershey could not stop inventing new candies and couldn’t shake his obsession with finding a way to mass-produce milk chocolate, a new phenomenon that only had been cracked in 1875 by the Swiss. ![]() At forty-two, the king of caramel surprised the industry when he sold his Lancaster Caramel Company to a rival for $1 million ($31 million in 2019 dollars). ![]() Both supported and encouraged Milton to be his greatest self.Īfter a decade and three failed candy companies, twenty-nine-year-old Hershey finally succeeded, creating one of America’s most successful caramel companies. His father, Henry, was a dreamer, chasing oil gushers and silver rushes, and his mother, Fanny, a strict Mennonite. At fifteen, he found his passion in a Lancaster ice cream parlor making candies. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1857, Milton Hershey attended seven different schools and never made it beyond the fourth grade. ![]()
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