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welcome to the hershey story museum. my name’s amy zeigler and i’m a director here. we’re going to start our tour with our mural in the lobby. when we opened this building in

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2009, we wanted everyone who came to really understand that this is a museum about milton hershey. he is the first thing you see when you come in. this beautiful mural was painted an artist named william cochran from maryland, and it’s in the trump lewis style. and that means trick the eye. so it looks three dimensional, but it isn’t. and his vision for this was he wanted to show milton hershey coming back to modern day hershey to kind see all the things that he created his lifetime that are still here the most important being milton school. and so steps are actually based on a set of steps at the homestead which is the birthplace of milton hershey, also the first building that was part milton hershey school. the children are actual students from the school in 2008 we photograph them with a stand in for milton hershey and then kind of made it onto the mural. and they’re wonderful.

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several of them have come back to visit us. one of them actually worked at the museum a brief period, so it was kind of a fun project. all of the buildings, the background, so the beautiful community, this is first hershey trust company building. the first bank, hershey park is, part of the mural, the hotel hershey and hershey, all of these were created by milton hershey. but you can, based on the kids clothing, also these hershey’s kisses, street lights that didn’t come to be until the 1960s. this is actually hershey today. so i think he did a beautiful job. people really love it. and this is a favorite for photos when people come to the museum. so we’re going to head upstairs and check out our exhibits. so this facade represents the homestead where milton hershey was born, and it’s the entrance to exhibit area called failures to fortunes. here is where we talk about

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milton hershey’s family, his early businesses, failures and successes before the chocolate company. and i love to take a moment to talk about milton’s. his parents were very so his mother, her name was veronica. everyone called her fanny. she was a very strict mennonite. she believed in hard work, family she’s very close to her family. and his father was a bit of a dreamer. he had a lot of jobs all over pennsylvania. he was a huge risk taker, loved to read so they were very not alike at all. he did have a sister. her name was serena she was born when milton was six years old, died at the age of four. milton was ten. and they never had any other children. when milton was his father got him an apprenticeship with the german printer that not go well, he was fired after not being

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there for very long. and then his mother got an apprenticeship with a man named joseph in nearby lancaster. and that’s where he really learned how to make candy kind of found his passion when he became an apprentice, his father moved, kind of lived in different parts of the country, and his parents never lived together again. he really got the best of both them. he was incredibly hard working, but really not afraid to take risks and, you know, very creative and kind of like his father. so it kind of worked out for him, even though it didn’t work out for them. and he did have great relationships with both of them until the end of their so they both came back to hershey and lived with him. we’ll move on to this other facade here and this represents milton’s first business in philadelphia. so when he was in lancaster working for joseph royer, they were not making chocolate. chocolate at that time was really only used to coat things and it was usually dark

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chocolate, not milk. and so this is just a partial list of lots of the candies he was making. so you can imagine it was sold like in bulk. he wasn’t selling of individual pieces, but you can see how big this list is and how busy he must have been working, you know, to make candy at night and then selling it during the day. his mother and his aunt did come to visit and his father did come to stay with him. he got to philadelphia in 1876 during the centennial. millions of people in philadelphia at that time, this was good for business. he was very close to where the exposition was happening. but then that ended and his father came to town and got involved and tried to get him into different businesses. they created a candy sales cabinet and basically this is kind of a flat tray that you can fill and slide in so that when you pull candy out of the drawers in the back, the front, it always looks like it’s full

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and they tried to patent this and, sell it to other shops to sell hershey’s candy, but it didn’t really go very well. his father wanted to to denver and so milton him out of the business for over $300 and it left him no money to his bills. he ended up declaring he had received a lot of money from his uncle, his mother’s brother, and he kind of said enough is enough. so he cut him off. he went bankrupt. then he traveled around the united states. he went to denver, where learned how to use fresh milk to make caramels just a very important part of the story coming up. he also traveled to chicago and new orleans eventually, went to new york city, opened another business there. rent was very high so he ended up failing there, bankruptcy and heading back lancaster. so he back to lancaster and opens the lancaster company in 1886. and this is where his caramel making skill came into into.

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he was able to use that and he opened his store help from a man who had helped and worked with him in philadelphia named levy kicker and they developed crystal a caramels, which were a big seller for them and. a man from england happened to be in lancaster and tasted them and liked them and ordered a very large order to be sent to. and so he took the order to the bank and was able to borrow money in order to buy raw materials to make products. and that was kind of the beginning of his success. by 1894, he had over 1300 employees. so that was considering he had just declared bankruptcy. that was a pretty big, pretty deal. and lancaster, his time in lancaster was really kind of his most extravagant. he was a very extravagant person for most of his life. but this was he bought his first big home. he joined a coaching club, one of my favorite pieces is this plate. it’s a wedgwood plate and created it for a going away

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dinner for milton hershey when he was taking a trip. europe, his name is at the top, circled by a riding crop and then all the other attendees are around the rim and the menu was on the plate and we have other plates that show other people’s names at the top because that was at their place settings that really fun. you can see a picture of kitty hershey, her name was katherine. everyone, her kitty. he actually met her on sales call to jamestown, new york, where she lived. and they courted for about a year and they married in 1888 in new york city. and came back to hershey to live, much to his mother’s chagrin, was not a huge fan. and the ending quickly moved out of his house. but they became friends and we have lots of postcards that kitty wrote back to her mother in law as they traveled. kind of a nice thing. i do want to highlight when he was in lancaster running the carmel company that time, he visited the columbian exposition, became interested in

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making chocolate. and so in 1894, he incorporated the carmel with the chocolate hershey chocolate, a subsidiary. and you can see we have two examples of that he was making. there’s chrysanthemums then fans they’re very molds the fan has little cat at the end of each blade and they would have had to be hand molded and packaged because the boxes were kind of different shapes. so while they were popular, he had over 100 different chocolate novelties, dark chocolate novelties, and it was very time consuming to make them. it’s quite a menu. yes, but it changed in 1900 he sold the caramel company to his biggest competitor, the american caramel, for $1,000,000 in cash and stock. he had decided caramels were a fad and chocolate was going to be the way to go. so that’s what he did. and he turned around, started buying a property. derry township d r r why not dairy cows?

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and in order to have dairy farms to supply what he wanted to be his new chocolate factory with milk. so we’re going to head through this next, which is the entrance to the hershey company. he broke ground in 1903 and he still didn’t have a milk chocolate recipe that he was prepared to make. that’s dairy. yeah. so that’s kind of interesting. we’re going to take a quick step back. i mentioned he got into chocolate 1894, and that is because 1893 he traveled to the columbian exposition, was taking place in chicago. it was a huge world’s fair celebrating the 400th anniversary. columbus’s voyage and. he went to machinery hall and they had a huge display. they a venus de milo and all kinds of fun things. and it was machinery hall that’s pictured in this photograph that he purchased first two pieces of chocolate making equipment and them shipped to lancaster. it cost $20,000. and when we designed the lobby

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of our building, we really wanted each space to have a historical reference. so we really based its look on this of machinery hall. so there’s lots of exposed steel lots of natural light it’s open. so we’re very pleased with how that turned. so fast forward, we’re in the chocolate factory, so we finally has figured if the rest is out, by the time it opened in 1905, in 1907, they create one of their flagship candies, which is hershey’s kisses. it was always called kiss. yes. and from 1907 to about 1921, they had to wrap them by hand. so you would take a tissue, a foil square, put a piece of tissue on it that had a hershey logo, you would sit the kiss in it and then wrap it up and twist it. and so people were doing by hand. his mother would sit at her and wrap kisses for him, and it was time consuming. and so in 1921, they created a wrapping machine and.

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this version that we have shown here is a little bit later than that they had increased the number of kind of channels that kisses came down. and what would happen is they have a foil roll. they put a plume is, what we call the little flag that sticks out, put the plume there, the kiss on it, push it down and twist it in kind of this piece that was two metal rings connected with elastic. and the story goes that the elastic came from a girdle that they bought at the hershey store company when they were developing the machine, which which was developed by some gentleman that worked the chocolate factory. so machine that we have was given to us in 2008 by the chocolate company, but it’s in front of a photo of virtually the same machine and picture was taken in the 1930s so they used same technology for many, many years inside the factory, which i think is really fascinating. and one of the things that i

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love about hearing stories of working in the factory is the creativity of the people who there. i thankfully the opportunity to visit almost every department of the factory during the time worked for the museum and the people were so wonderful and interested telling me about what they did, showing me how their jobs worked. but i used to love because they would always hand us things and tell us about how they made them. so we have all these tools. some of them are obviously like scrapers, some of them we have no idea what they were for. they were all made inside the factory by employees, many of them custom made for specific machines they had to deal with. so there’s a wooden handle with a metal sleeve that was used in the knock out department and women would flip these really heavy chocolate molds over and bang on them with that hammer to get the chocolate bars out when the factory first opened and everyone and women said that was the toughest place work in the

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factory. but it was all women in the beginning. so there’s really interesting kind of stories about that. there are trucks. when they first opened the factory, they had to a lot of raw materials, finished chocolate around and they needed an efficient way to do it. so they bought a lot of bathtubs, put them on wheels, and that’s how things worked. so creative theory, i do want to point out we have these great kiosks here. they work with some rfid coins that we hand out when people come into the museum and you can use them to trigger fun little videos. they tell stories about things that we don’t necessarily have artifacts to support, but are important to the story. we have five of those throughout the museum and you’ll notice this one says caramels are a fad. chocolate permanent. i’m going to make chocolate. and that is what milton hershey’s cousin said that he told him when they visited columbian exposition together. so what started this all? yeah, yeah. we’re walking into theater and

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this is really where we explore how milton was able to take what was a very expensive treat and turn it into something that anyone could so there were a couple of different things that he did. number one, he looked cities for locations for his factory. he ultimately chose to come to derry township because it was surrounded by dairy farms and milk chocolate needs a lot of milk and lots of european chocolate were using dried milk. but he to use fresh milk because he had been using it in caramels and it worked. and that’s what he had. so he came up with a way to condense the milk it with sugar and then condense it again in order to remove the water, because milk is mostly water. cocoa have a lot of fat in them in form of cocoa butter, and you can’t mix very easily. so in order to make chocolate without powdered milk chocolate, he had to figure out a way to remove a lot of the water. so he did that. and he also started using

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production techniques. he opened his in 1905 and by 1915 he had the biggest chocolate factory in the world. so that really kind of allowed him to sell it at a cheaper price. his first bar was $0.05, and i remained $0.05 into the 1960s. so that’s quite affordable. yeah, it is. and that’s why the hershey company has always made money, even during the depression because chocolate makes feel better and can give you a little moment of happiness. and when you only need a couple of pennies to do that when you don’t have a lot of money it’s an affordable way to bring a little joy to your life. so there we have in this space we have these wonderful illustrations of all the different steps of making chocolate for people who are very interested. and then we have this great video we use a lot of still pictures, but any of the moving footage was actually from a movie called the gift of montezuma that was created in the 1930s by the hershey company, and it had a great look

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at the chocolate making process as well. his entire community, because then he had really built an amazing place, his workers to live and for people visit and the great thing about that movie is it came out just a few years after the jazz singer, which is the first movie that had sound so milton hershey loved to and innovative things. so it makes perfect sense that he would have done that so early. and what a great branding opportunity. i know he was very interested branding. he was also a good pennsylvanian german and never let anything go to waste. so he came up with ways to use all the of making chocolate. one of them was take the shells from cocoa beans and, turn them into mulch, which you can still buy around here to put in your flowerbeds and it does smell a little chocolaty. he also used leftover cocoa butter make all kinds of soap he had lots of dairy farms so he had an excess amount of milk so he had a creamery. you could have milk delivered to your house.

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you could buy cottage cheese, butter, any kind of product you needed. they sold ice cream. and one fun thing that wasn’t a by product we talk about here was the fact that he sold chewing gum for a while. he apparently had a little spat with william wrigley, and so he developed his own gum to compete with him. but the best part of it is it’s mint flavored, but it was wrapped in hershey’s maroon and silver packaging, so it looked like it would be chocolate. that didn’t last too long. wrigley sold five sticks for $0.05, and milton was selling six sticks for $0.05. and had something to do with taxes. and he got into some trouble and then he had to stop making it. so no more chewing gum. but we have some there with the chocolate. that’s what matters. so we’re going to take another step back in time for a moment. i mentioned he sold the caramel company in 1900 and he maintained some in there so he could continue to make products and perfect his recipe. and so he needed a place to sell

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them. so he opened a soda fountain and and there’s a photograph of it here. it was beautiful. so he put on one side all of these miniature chocolate making machines. so he had kind of a mini little plant in there. always say it’s the first hershey’s chocolate world. and then he bought this beautiful horsehair, which is a lamp. and it was originally made for the columbian exposition that we talked about, and that was the electricity, a big deal at that exposition. and lots of people who are exhibiting were showcasing electricity. so this lamp has over 1200 parts, 30 lights, it’s over 12 feet tall and weighs over 600 pounds. and it’s quite beautiful. eventually made it into the foyer of his home point in hershey, which gave to the country club to in 1930 as their clubhouse. and we have an oral history

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talks about children throwing toilet paper, the second floor over the railing onto the tauscher and that is how it ended up the museum and the space we’re walking into is about marketing. hershey’s chocolate, the power of promotion it’s called the hershey company did not use a national advertising or any national media 1970 long after mr. hershey died. they did a lot of creative marketing things. one of the things that we highlight, they had a humongous sales force and what they would do is create these elaborate sales windows that we’ve recreated that are very beautiful and they’ve come with these great displays to put in the windows that wouldtheir pror sort of walking down the street. and then they had lots of other i mentioned here over 100 different products when he in lancaster when he opened the chocolate company he had after a

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few years less than ten so you can kind of see in this case there’s hershey’s cocoa that’s red, white and blue, hershey sweet peas. and then there’s a hershey bar and two hershey cocoa products. and they all have the same maroon and silver coloring. so when you look at anything like that, you immediately know it’s a hershey’s product. so you really change the way he was selling things. so this is maroon, not brown? yes, maroon munsell maroon is the name name. and originally he was using maroon and gold, but he was sued because. someone else was using that combination. so then it was changed to silver. one of the other things they did to sell was talking about how healthy they were. so they had breakfast, cocoa and slogans like a nourishing food. my personal favorite is more sustaining meat. they did things like, put all these candy dispensers throughout the new york subway system where you know millions

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of people would be able to see them and try their products out. you see the first person to do this that i’m not sure. a very good question. and they also did things like teachers could write into the chocolate company and request an education kit for free. and each one of those vials contains like cocoa beans, the cocoa nibs, cocoa butter and it kind of breaks down the different parts of bean and explains how chocolate is made. in the 1960s, they started adding really fun holiday packaging things to their line, which was fun. i love the hershey’s kisses. valentine’s day, little cherub. and they also talked about hershey as a place as well as a product. so they always used town and the chocolate to kind of advertise other and a perfect example of that are these bar cards so there’s these little postcards they’re skinnier a normal postcard but they highlight different of the community so

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that no matter where you are for night from 1909 to about 1918, 19, 19, you could buy a hershey’s milk chocolate or milk chocolate with almonds and they would have a postcard in it talking about this place that you could visit. it was clean and green and had wonderful opportunities and some of the pictures would be inside the factory. you’re talking about the great sanitary that they had. so that was a great using the sales of the chocolate to also sell the town. and this is a souvenir pillow from hershey park. and this one, i believe. yes, has the chocolate factory in the upper. so lots of souvenirs that you could get at hershey park, which opened in 1906, highlighted chocolate factory. we also have this timeline, the top part, the blue part, talks about hershey’s products and they were introduced and below that, the orange part looks at different things that were happening in general u.s. history at the time to kind of help put it in context is really

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fun. so the area we’re walking is called hershey builds. hershey and it’s all about building community of hershey. so we’ve looked at businesses and now we’re going to look at what they did for people who lived here. and one of the things that really influenced how the community looked was all of their so milton and kitty hershey traveled over the world. we have his passport here, which is we know he was five seven on the internet. it says five nine but they’re wrong. and it kind of we found a postcard sort of excerpts that kitty would write home to hershey. her mother in, which is fun. it also us where they went and when we have this beautiful tiffany sterling silver toiletry set that milton hershey used, you can see it’s monogrammed m’s h for milton snavely hershey snavely was his mother’s maiden name and probably the most

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popular thing on this wall is this canceled check to the white star line because milton hershey bought a ticket for the titanic. oh yeah. he was with his wife and he ended up having to come home early for business. so he was on the america, which is the ship that told the titanic about all the icebergs. but thankfully, he not on the titanic. and we have a postcard that says just heard of sinking of the big steamer how thankful i am god directs us to safety in our travels so thank goodness because that was that was 1912. so he had established hershey school in 1909. but during the 1930s he had what we called the great building campaign. so a lot of the iconic legacy buildings in the community wouldn’t have been here. a lot of what he did happened after the titanic sinking. so thankfully he was not there. so we’ll talk a little bit about just the general development and

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building of the town. how did he come up with this idea for the town? it’s very interesting that time there were a lot of model industrial communities kind of popping up across united states and in europe. one example we talk about two examples in the museum. one is pullman. so george pullman, the railroad car magnate who created a community just outside of chicago and came up around the time of the columbian exposition, they actually had excursion that went to pullman and it was a beautiful community with lovely buildings and really a wonderful seemingly place to live. but it was very restrictive. you to work for him, to live there, you couldn’t your own business, you couldn’t own a home. so that meant he was controlling your rent and your wages and he sometimes would raise rent and not wages. and, you know, people were not generally happy there once they realized how it was going to there was a terrible and people died and it ended up that it

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just not a place you know not something milton hershey would want to do. he almost certainly went there when he was at the columbian exposition because it was very popular thing to do. and then there was a town in england called bournville, and that was by the cadbury brothers and people who worked at that chocolate company could take time off to go classes. they could own homes, they had beautiful little cottages and lots of green space. and it was just a beautiful community. and i think every quote and description of milton hershey that we have even from his earliest youngest days, he was always very interested in helping other people. and i don’t know where that comes from. he had a bit of a difficult childhood. his father, they didn’t have a lot of money and his father move them around a lot. and he always had people who could sort of help him when he needed it when he needed money. in the beginning, his philadelphia venture, you know, got back to lancaster and his friend libby loaned him money. and so he always kind of had a

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leg up. and i think he really recognized that that was important thing to provide for people when had the opportunity. and so that was really what he did and he wanted not just to be an owner and a boss, he wanted people who lived his community to be able to have recreation opportunities and educational opportunities, you know, experience other. he really tried hard to go above and beyond when providing for people who lived here so to that end, he they owned all of utilities. he provided the telephone company, the sewer company, the gas company, the electric company. you can see the sewer lead here, says h east, and that stands for hershey estates. in 1927, he had established milton hershey school, and there was the chocolate company. and then all these other businesses to run the town. and they were all kind of under the chocolate company. and so was a concern that if

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something happened to of those businesses, it would affect all of the businesses and in effect would hurt milton hershey school, which was being supported by those businesses. so they separated the non chocolate business from the chocolate and then created something called the chocolate sales corporation, which handled their cuban holdings. and that way they able to kind of safeguard things a little bit more. so hershey estates, the outgrowth of that. and we’ll get to cuba, right? we will. very, very interesting story. and then they established the hershey lumber company and, you know, they were starting to build buildings all over town. we have a really wonderful collection of in our archive of blueprints from all these buildings, which is really, really terrific. this one in particular is the hershey trust company, which was the community’s first bank. that’s where you can get your mortgage. they also the trustee for milton hershey school when they were established in 1909. so they also have a great

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history here. i mentioned cuba. so milton hershey, his wife, unfortunately passed away in 1915. and so in 1916, in the winter, early, he and his mother, we’re going to go getaway and out of hershey and go to new orleans. but the weather was very poor. so they decided at the last minute to to cuba. and while they were there, he really fell in love with the island, was beautiful and. the biggest thing that they do in cuba is grow sugar. and that is something that he could use some some of and so he started buying sugar plantation house and he established a community the northern side of the island. he built an electric railroad. he brought electricity to that part of the island for the first time. he he had a sugar mill built a refinery. it was the first one on the island before that, they were sending their sugar to the united states, mostly to be refined. he created a whole community. it had worker housing, it had beautiful botanical garden, a

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hotel, his railroad had an accident some of his employees were killed. so he started school like milton hershey school, to take care of their children and other children in need. so it was a really amazing place. one of my best days at work. i was so excited. there was a family and the father and the both actually had grown up hershey, cuba, and he was born the year milton hershey died in 1945. so the town in cuba also called hershey. yes, it was. and so he lived for a long time and things for the what during his childhood of remained exactly as they were when milton hershey was had been running and it was so wonderful and he loved it and it was such wonderful part of his childhood and life growing up there. he eventually had to leave and he went to florida and. he hadn’t been on a vacation in 15 years, and when he had the chance to go somewhere, the only place he wanted to go was hershey, pennsylvania, because he wanted talk to people who

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would appreciate milton hershey as much as he did. and it was just a beautiful cool experience and he was wonderful. and he donated a ton of photos and this bat boy uniform that he wore when he was living there as a child. so and, you know like here, milton hershey paid well and died in cuba. the sugar is temporary. and so he opened a heineken plant where they made rope and a peanut oil plant so that during the off season his employees would have work and they wouldn’t have to go find something else to and they would want to stay. so he kind brought this sort of ethos to cuba as well. what happened to hershey, cuba. do we know if it eventually when castro took over, they took over the sugar refineries, plants. and it’s the town is there, the railroad is still there. it runs well. you’re often picked up by a bus, i think halfway where you’re going to on the map. it is.

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and a lot of the buildings have kind fallen into disrepair. the sugar refinery closed. i think for good. around 2012. so that’s not really running. but we have talked to people from there and it’s interesting there was a baseball field and. kids still go play baseball there like every day, which is really great. so not the way it was, but still interesting that it’s there. in 1906, milton hershey created hershey park and it wasn’t the amusement park that you think of today, but they had picnic grounds and kids playgrounds and lots of different things to do. there was a ballroom this is one of my favorite photos of these gorgeous huge lanterns that you can see in the background. they great big bands that would come to play. we have this autograph book that has benny goodman, gene krupa, autographs in it, which are fantastic golf, was huge in hershey. there was a the country club and they also several other i think

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at one time there were a total of six golf courses in hershey. and then hogan, who was a very famous professional golfer, was the golf pro here from 1941 to 1951. so we have contract in one of his clubs. so there was as mentioned, a lot to do recreationally in hershey. we do have a very rich collection of oral histories, too, of people who lived here and worked for his businesses. so you can guests can take a listen to some excerpts from those, which is really fun. a product that i think everyone is aware of from the hershey company is reese’s peanut butter cups and. this is the story of how the bricks candy company began. there was a man named harry reese actually worked on one of milton hershey’s farms for a period of time and he started making candy in own house. and this is a great story of how milton hershey supports did other people, even when they

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making something to compete with what he was making. so reese’s peanut butter cups became a very big product for them in the 1920s. they became very big. you can see this photo says 16 good reasons to buy reese’s because harry and his wife had 16 children and created other products before peanut butter cups with peanut butter cups are what really took off and then they had they or they were in a factory on chocolate avenue and then they outgrew that. they built another factory further up the road. and then in 1963, they were purchased by the hershey chocolate company. and now they’re one of their biggest brands. so it wasn’t really a competitor right? were probably using hershey chocolate. they were in fact, hershey’s two biggest customers for many years were the tabriz candy company and mars. so mars was buying coating chocolate, their products that were coated in chocolate. the hershey company and eminem’s

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an interesting story. there was a man who ran the chocolate called william murray, and his son went to work at mars to kind of learn the business. and he, one of the mars children, eminem’s and the m’s stood for murray mars. and then murray got bought out pretty early on. but there’s a hershey connection to eminem which i think is fascinating. so, so so this is some great photos of people working in the factory. and this is a look, some of the businesses we talked about the dairy the hershey store company we have this fur and a hat box like there was a there’s a photo that i’ve seen on chocolate avenue that has assigned to hotel hershey right next to the hershey store company, right next to the chocolate avenue sign and the hershey trust company. that kind of shows, you know, all of the different things that he did. it was supervised to people vertical here.

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yeah, it was it’s interesting. and i actually worked with someone who moved here in the late sixties or early seventies and said when they first got here, you could write one check to hershey estates and pay all of your utility bills, your credit card bill at the store and your rent. you were renting an apartment from them. easy. i wish life was that easy now. so let’s see. i will mention quickly hershey has always had a history of good labor relations. in 1937, there a strike around seniority and pay pay differentials. men and women and some other things. and in 1937 was a really huge year for organizing for the cio and the afl and the cio came to hershey, try to organize factory workers. and what happened was a sit down strike that ended with some injuries. it was not it was a end to the strike.

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there. many people who supported milton hershey, there were many farmers were selling milk that wanted it to get used. and so it was a it was a really huge turning point for things worked in hershey. and i will say there was the community people. there were people worked in the factory and there were people who the chocolate company, while the strike itself a really horrible in time the way that those three groups related to each other after was really incredible so i’ve talked to union lawyers, people who negotiated for the company and they really had a massive amount of respect for each other and employees genuinely working at the chocolate company and like working on the chocolate company. and so it’s a really interesting at what worked in community when you hear so much about what didn’t work, you know, milton hershey from his earliest in 1921 he wrote in someone’s

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autograph book when he was on the verge of bankruptcy. one is only happy and life is in proportion is he makes others feel happy and. i think that he really always wanted to do what was best for people, and that is, you know, what happened. so i think that it’s an interesting story that more people need to hear hear in this these spaces here kind of talk about just the community. so hershey junior college was started by hershey and it was free for anyone lived in hershey or anyone who worked for one of his companies and their families. you could a completely free to your degree. that opened in 1936 and was around until the sixties. this takes a look at some pieces from the community. this door is actually a house that used to be on the site where the museum that this wonderful dentist family lived in that we got to know and were just lovely. that’s a sled that was made by a family that lived on pat’s hill, which is the name of the hill where the hotel is located.

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there’s just so many great stories about people who used to live here. so milton hershey and his wife kitty were unable to have children, and in 1909 they established what was then the hershey industrial school and wanted to really provide opportunities for boys they thought it was easier to place girls with families. they really wanted to make sure that boys in need had a way to learn how to learn a trade and support themselves. so they established a school in 1909, kitty, actually, before she had the right to vote, was included in signing the deed of trust, which was a very unusual move at that time to have your wife sign something like that. and he always said that it was her idea, which i think wonderful. my story about milton hershey is that. 1918 he took $60 million about what was his holdings, and the chocolate company placed it into

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a trust milton hershey school, and didn’t tell anyone that he had done it. so several years later, there was an article in the new york times that came out that explained what he did. and he actually a lot of criticism for it. if you can believe that people were like, why would give all your money away to these children, we’re not going to have orphans. there’s not going to be enough kids to be in the school eventually. and thankfully he didn’t listen to any of that. and milton hershey school today continues to serve boys and, girls now. and they can go the age of four until they graduate and. everything is provided for them. and just an amazing opportunity for kids in need. and then the final section of this museum talks about his philanthropy. so we start kind of talking about milton hershey school there, and then we continue around here. so the hershey story museum is part of the mms, hershey foundation, which was established in the 1930s. so he gave fortune away in 1918 and then he gave it away again

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1935 to the foundation. and the mission is to provide cultural and educational opportunities in derry township. and so currently we operate the hershey story museum, hershey gardens, hershey community archives and hershey theater. so those the four things that we do. he also gave $20,000 to each of the five churches in hershey during the great depression and help them build new buildings pay off mortgages. there’s a wonderful oral history recording of a man who was involved with saint joan of arc, catholic church, and he actually cries, talking about they when he made that gift and how much it helped them. and, you know, it’s just a wonderful kind of tribute to what he did. he established the volunteer fire, bought them their first pieces of equipment. he really he really had his hand and pocketbook in just about everything that happened here. yeah. he really did. pretty amazing. and we have one recording of his

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voice and you can listen to it. this kiosk, there’s an interview he did in 1938 with a man named edgar guest. he had a radio show called it can be done, and we broke up into some parts, but you can listen to a section it here, along with the hershey industrial school been in operation since 1909. now can you tell me what has happened to some of the boys you’ve trained there. well one is because of the press come two were in the bank and, the other in respective positions. you see with some of the boys through until we see that have got. so it was a great feeling of accomplished meant for him that students from his school on to work in the businesses that he started to which is really wonderful. so this is the finale the museum and you have a little that you were able to personalize when you started and because the whole museum we talk about his

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business but philanthropy is what we want people take away from this. he was very in providing for other people and as i said, not taking credit for. so the for main things that he did during his lifetime were to provide education and and take care of children and provide for a community. so we ask people if you have time, talent or treasure to give to of these things, what would you choose. and then you can put your coin in a slot. and then if you look at the screen over here. you get your own little message the end. so thank you you.

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and good afternoon, everyone. thank you all for coming today. it’s my

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