Milton Hershey

Milton Hershey was born in 1857 on a farm in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, to a Mennonite mother and a father who drifted from one failed scheme to the next. The family moved so often that Milton attended seven schools and left for good after the fourth grade. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a confectioner in Lancaster.

In 1876 he opened his own candy shop in Philadelphia. It struggled for six years and closed. He followed his father to Denver, where he learned to make caramels with fresh milk, then tried again in Chicago, New Orleans and New York, and failed again. In 1886 he was back in Lancaster, broke, and relatives refused to lend him more. A local bank did, and the Lancaster Caramel Company took off after an English importer placed a large order.

At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago he saw German chocolate-making machinery and bought it. In 1900 he sold the caramel business for a million dollars to concentrate on milk chocolate, then a luxury that nobody had made cheaply. He built a factory in the fields where he had been born, and around it a town with houses, a school, a park, a trolley line and later a hotel and a stadium.

He and his wife Catherine could not have children. In 1909 they founded a school for orphan boys, and in 1918, three years after Catherine's death, he quietly gave it almost his entire fortune in company stock. During the Depression he kept men employed by building. He died in 1945. The school now educates thousands of children from low-income families and still controls the company.