Helga without the H

Last weekend I headed up to glorious Hershey, Pennsylvania, primarily for the purpose of catching a couple Hershey Bears (AHL hockey) games. I was so excited for the opportunity to visit the amusement park I remember loving as a child, but quickly was saddened when I realized it’s February and the park is closed. Thankfully Hershey Chocolate World was still open, which means I got to go on an adorable (free!) indoor ride that explains how chocolate is made, plus I got to eat and buy chocolate. I love chocolate more than almost anything in the world, so I was in heaven. However, we still had an afternoon to kill before hockey, so we wandered over the the kinda-boring-looking museum.

This museum was not boring. It was awesome! I perused some reviews ahead of time, and I think some people visiting with young children expected something a bit more child-focused and gimmicky (like all the fun crazy shit at Chocolate World.) This museum was fine for kids, with enough interactive exhibits to keep their attention to at least some degree. For example: You’re handed a paper disk/coin thing, and when you come up to certain displays and touch your coin to the display, a little video appears, greets you by name, then tells you a story. It’s kinda gimmicky, sure, but it worked great for both kids and adults for keeping things interactive and engaging. There’s also a little video game where you build an assembly line, plus buttons you can press to turn on big working machinery (I even heard parents telling their kids “hey look! a button!”), video screens where you can design your own wrapper (I mean, it’s literally just picking a color and a clip-art, but it’s good enough for the kiddos), plus just lots of colorful-looking candy-related stuff.

That being said, I think adults will get way more out of this museum than kids. My husband I are huge nerds, so we were in there for absolutely forever reading every dang plaque and analyzing every display and artifact. I just had no idea how much brand new info I would learn!

This museum is basically Hershey Propaganda. And it worked. We left in absolute awe of all things Hershey. We are Hershey superfans now. In every section, we were impressed. Some examples: First, you learn about Milton Hershey, the founder of Hershey, and how he had several failed candy businesses before taking off. This guy’s solution to pretty much everything was to make it better by adding milk. So he finally found success by making milk-laced caramel (before the standard was, I shit you not, wax instead of milk.) For some reason, Hershey gambled away his entire non-way caramel fortune because he had a gut feeling that chocolate was going to take off, and caramels were a passing fad. And turns out he was 100% right. At various points throughout the museum, we just randomly exclaimed, “But how did he know???” Along those same lines, at least according to the museum, Hershey built basically a utopia for his employees. He built his factory in his hometown, then created a company town where he encouraged all of his employees to own their own houses. he invested heavily in making sure their lives were well-rounded, meaning the town was full of parks and culture. He was building waterslides for his workers in the freaking 1920’s. The employee handbooks (on display) were full of totally reasonable worker rules like “it’s ok to call out sick. Just tell your foreman.” This at a time when miners were basically enslaved to their company store and being shot by Pinktertons for striking, and steel barons were running sweatshops and Newsies are being charged more for their pape’s.

This place made Hershey and his utopian chocolate town sound so insanely perfect that we switched out thinking from “how is he so great?!” to “Wait… what’s the catch? What’s the seedy underbelly of Hershey?” My guess was that maybe the townspeople can only spend their wages in the company store (like miners, get it?) but the company store only sells chocolate. Which, frankly, would be awesome. And then we thought maybe the factory conditions were brutal, but then we saw the company handbooks. Maybe he faked being altruistic for his public image but is actually a dick to everyone. Except he donated insane amounts of money to found a school for orphans and didn’t tell anybody about it until after some newspaper discovered it and announced it tot he world 5 years later. And he left his entire fortune to the school in his will. We spent our drive home googling any/every possible bit of negative news about Hershey (the man, the town, the company, etc) and we got virtually nothing. The only bad stuff was true of the chocolate industry in general (ie: the conditions of the countries and farms on which cocoa is harvested, especially with child labor), and it applies to virtually every major chocolate company in the world.

We also enjoyed learning about the history of when the company added and removed various candies. Like Reese’s was actually a completely separate company founded by someone who lived in Hershey and bought Hershey chocolate for his peanut butter cups. Hershey also used to manufacture a melt-resistant chocolate back called the Tropical Bar that was distributed to soldiers in WW2. When trying to figure out the seedy Hershey story, we thought maybe the Tropical Bar would be the key. What keeps those things from melting? Is is asbestos? We had to wait for the drive home to google it; not asbestos, just oat flour.

There was so much to learn and see at this museum that I’m not going to lie; I had museum fatigue by the end and couldn’t read anymore. So for me the Hershey town history towards the end dragged. There was a whole other exhibit about Hershey, Cuba that I could only skim because I couldn’t read anymore. (Was Hershey, Cuba as big of a disaster as Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in Brazil?! Was this the seedy underbelly?! No. Hershey, Cuba seemed fine, and only fell apart cuz of Castro or whatever.)

Since I had a guest for this one, I asked my husband for his input on this review. He said his one critique was that it wasn’t clear which of the items we were looking at were actual artifacts versus reproductions. Some of the displays didn’t look like they were set up to hold antique paper, which made him suspicious. If we can’t trust this piece of 100 year old cardboard, then can we trust anything else in this place?! For example, at one point they have a returned check from the White Star Line. Cuz Hershey was supposed to be on THE TITANIC but canceled his trip!!! Which is insane and but is only mentioned in one tiny tiny display about how the Hersheys liked traveling. There’s no way that’s the REAL check, is it? Who knows.

Bottom line: This museum is great, and there’s probably something in there for pretty much everyone except for very young kids. It’s a real museum, though. So if you bring kids to this thing when they’re expecting roller coasters and basically Willy Wonka Land, prepare for some grumpy faces.