A successful entrepreneur...eventually.

Following a four-year apprenticeship as a teenager to a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, candy maker, Hershey in 1876 attempted to start his own candy business in Philadelphia. Despite six years of hard work, it failed. So he moved to Denver and found work with a confectioner who taught him how to make caramels using fresh milk. He then started up a second candy business in New York City. It also failed. Undaunted, he returned to Lancaster and once again tried making a go of the caramel business. This time, it worked. Soon, his Lancaster Caramel Company was shipping all over the U.S. and Europe, employing 1400 people and turning him into one of the area’s leading citizens.

But what about the chocolate?

It was at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that Hershey first became fascinated with the art of chocolate making. While there, he purchased some German machinery, had it shipped to Lancaster and began producing chocolate coatings for his caramels. But aware of the growing demand for chocolate itself, he soon started the Hershey Chocolate Company. For years, he worked at perfecting a viable recipe for making milk chocolate -- a process which up to then had been kept a closely guarded secret by the Swiss. Finally, through trial and error, he hit upon the right formula of milk, sugar and cocoa that enabled him to realize his dream of mass producing and distributing milk chocolate candy. What had once been a luxury for the rich, was to become an enjoyment that anyone could afford...the Hershey bar.

A new business needs a new location.

With his Hershey Chocolate Company growing by leaps and bounds, Hershey decided to sell his caramel company (for $1 million, an enormous sum in 1900!) and devote his attention to making chocolate. Discovering a need to expand his production capacity, he began looking around for a suitable place to build a new factory. He found it in nearby Derry Township, where he had been born. Convenient to the port cities that could provide cocoa beans and sugar, surrounded by dairy farms and endowed with a hardworking populace, the area seemed ideal. In 1903, he broke ground.