Milton Hershey’s Utopian Amusement Park Turns 100

The scene at Hershey Park, shortly after it opened and today.

(Hershey Entertainment & Resorts)

For many decades, wooden crossbeams and undulating tracks rose above the tree-lined streets of Hershey, Pennsylvania, like an epic statue of some serpentine hero. To the people in the tidy homes below, the Ferris wheel spokes and wafting carousel music were a part of everyday life. But like the smokestacks of the nearby chocolate factory, Hershey’s amusement park, born 100 years ago today, was the embodiment of an ideal—that one’s personal wealth is best spent helping those around one—and was also a monument to the man who built it, Milton S. Hershey.

Although log flumes and kiddie rides might seem no more than simple fun now, when Hershey Park first opened, on April 24, 1907—with little more than a bandstand and a pavilion interrupting its shady groves—amusement parks were, like model towns, a tantalizing glimpse at a hopeful future, in which technology and human ingenuity promised to erase civilization’s ills. Hershey believed wholeheartedly in that vision, and he put it to the test when he built his attractive, luxurious company town in the dairy fields of Pennsylvania. He made sure his workers had safe homes, decent transportation, and, no less important, a source of wholesome amusement.

In the century before Hershey’s buildings first dotted the pastoral dairy fields of southeastern Pennsylvania, company towns mushroomed. During the Industrial Revolution, industrialists began to build water-powered factories along rural rivers, and, often miles from the closest village, they needed places to house their workers. As manufacturing snowballed after the Civil War, more and more employee villages cropped up, many of them merely rows of ramshackle tenements. Unsanitary living conditions, along with dangerous work, long hours, and low wages, sparked bitter labor unrest, including the Homestead Steel strike in 1892 and the 1902 coal miners’ strike, both in Pennsylvania.

By the turn of the century, many industrialists were starting to change their attitudes. Better living conditions, they reasoned, might inspire workers to be more productive. Hershey agreed. Time spent in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the 1870s and 1880s left him with a distaste for urban life. “Cities never seemed natural to me,” he said, “and I have never learned to like them.” Having broken ground for his new factory, Hershey set about creating an ideal community, free of big-city vice and discord. In 1903 he hired several Pennsylvania engineers and architects to lay out the model town, whose cheerful brick homes and ample greenery would inspire moral rectitude, industriousness, and social stability.

Workers began to move into the ready-made homes of Hershey, Pennsylvania, in late 1904. The town never officially incorporated, and although the government of nearby Derry Township held official control, Milton Hershey acted as unofficial mayor, planner, boss, and neighborhood association watchdog. He owned all the community’s utilities (including the town-wide water and electric service, a rarity in rural communities then) and many of the businesses, and he “liked to think his workers appreciated the services he gave them,” in the words of his biographer Joël Glenn Brenner. “He would often tour the town in his chauffeured convertible Cadillac, making note of lawns that weren’t mowed and homes that weren’t being properly maintained. . . . He also occasionally hired private detectives to find out answers to questions that bothered him—like where the liquor was coming from during Prohibition and who was responsible for throwing trash on the grounds of Hershey Park.” Most residents seemed to be happy to trade municipal power for real estate in Utopia, which was not surprising given Utopia’s amenities, among them a public library, a gym, a swimming pool, and a free 150-acre amusement park.

While thrill rides and carnival games might seem to have little association with moral rectitude, for Hershey and his contemporaries the impulse to build both model towns and amusement parks came from the same Progressive-era idealism—and the same real-life inspiration. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held over six months in Chicago in 1893, was, according to the writer Judith Adams, “the first presentation of a model modern city, where all services, including transportation, sanitation, water, power, and protection, could be systematically organized to insure maximum comfort, safety, efficiency, and beauty in an urban environment.” The White City, as the fair’s 630-acre array of neoclassical exhibition halls was called, sparkled in testament to the power of technology and design to elevate mankind.

Washing machines, electric-powered mass transit, and clean streets lined with beautiful sculpture, all under the auspicious glow of Edison’s light bulb, promised Americans the apotheosis sure to come with enough planning and invention: a unified nation studded with pristine, crime-free cities. (Never mind that blacks were largely excluded from the exposition’s planning and participation, or that the host city was at the time plagued by corruption and pollution and home to 7,000 saloons and 10,000 prostitutes.) Hershey himself, already enjoying success as a caramel manufacturer, attended the exposition, and one exhibit there changed his life—and the American diet. As he watched chocolate bars roll off a German company’s production line in the fair’s Machinery Building, he commented to his cousin, “The caramel business is a fad. It is not a stable business. But chocolate is something we will always have.” (Chocolate, touted as a wholesome cure for many vices, including alcoholism, was at the time a luxury not yet mass-produced in America.) He bought the exhibit’s entire works as soon as the fair closed.

As influential as the White City was, for the fair’s 27 million visitors—a full 43 percent of the country’s population—the nearby Midway was the bigger hit. It contained a mile of exhibits on so-called primitive societies and also featured performances by Harry Houdini and Scott Joplin, Hindu jugglers and Arabian belly dancers, boxing matches and beauty pageants, and the world’s first Ferris wheel. For city amusement parks like Coney Island, the Midway offered the blueprint: concessions, exotic spectacles, and mechanical rides. It was to the raucous urban playgrounds of the early twentieth century what the White City was to model towns.

A decade after the exposition, every major American city made room on its picnic grounds for a band shell, carousel, roller coaster, arcade, and Ferris wheel. Many of the new “trolley parks” rejected the brazen character of Coney (home to skirt-lifting compressed-air “blowholes” and the Barrel of Love, which spun riders into the laps of fellow revelers) and the Midway, turning back to the White City for their prototype, with its modern technology and precisely designed landscape as social emollient. An exhilarating escape from the tedium of workaday routine would vent an urbanite’s otherwise potentially disruptive frustrations. Visitors could indulge their desire for danger in a minutely controlled, family-friendly, usually alcohol-free environment.

It was a trend that jibed perfectly with Hershey’s plans. Hershey Park was envisioned as part of the model town from the earliest plat. The factory was completed in June 1905; slightly less than two years later, on April 24, 1907, a crowd of spectators joined Hershey and his wife in the brand-new grandstand as the park celebrated its grand opening with a baseball game. In its first year, the closest it came to a thrill ride were the canoes on its small lake. Hershey originally intended the wooded grounds to be a shady retreat for picnickers, but on July 4, 1908, he bowed to public demand and unveiled the park’s first pleasure ride, a merry-go-round. By 1912 Hershey Park boasted a $15,000 carousel, a miniature railroad, two bowling alleys, and a band shell. Admission was free; visitors paid a small fee per ride. “Every Saturday we’d go to the park,” remembered Monroe Stover, an early Hershey resident. “Nobody had to pay to get in, and the rides cost just a nickel. If you didn’t have any money, you could swim in the pool or listen to the live music or watch the people. It was a great way to pass the day.”

Hershey had planned the park as a refuge for his workers, but the publicity surrounding his model community quickly lured a steady stream of tourists. The revenue from more than 100,000 visitors a year allowed Hershey Park to double in size by the 1920s. Revelers’ nickels and quarters (together with the $7.7 million per year Hershey made selling building lots in town) financed a free zoo, a convention hall, a dance pavilion, and, on the town’s twentieth anniversary in 1923, its first roller coaster, the Wild Cat. As shrinking work weeks and rising wages gave Americans more leisure time and disposable income, roller coasters proved the perfect outlet for the thrill-hungry, speed-loving 1920s.

The Depression spelled an abrupt death for many amusement parks, but Hershey funded a building campaign in the 1930s to employ more than 600 men. In addition to erecting a community center, an opulent 1,900-seat theater, and a $2 million 190-room hotel, the workers updated the park with a fun house, a water flume, a penny arcade, and a new roller coaster. By 1940, the town of Hershey was welcoming 2 million visitors a year.

Hershey Park’s success notwithstanding, the 1940s represented the nadir of the American amusement park industry. Of the 2,000 parks operating in 1920, 1,750 had shut down by 1940. The postwar years, however, brought America new prosperity and a bumper crop of children to entertain. It was a lucrative nexus, one that a veteran Hollywood mogul was wise enough to exploit. In 1955 in an orange grove in Anaheim, California, Disneyland opened its gates and, with runaway success, redrew the blueprint for American amusement parks. Over the next two decades, its imitators—Busch Gardens, Six Flags, Great Adventure—would flourish across the country. No longer bounded by city streets, the new, corporate-owned theme parks sprang up along highways, unreachable by city subway or tram line. High walls isolated them from their surroundings, and visitors bought admission rather than paying a fee per ride. Unlike the earlier generation’s attempts to vent the pressures of urban life, these parks attempted to block out the realities of the city altogether. Inside, they presented a meticulously controlled fantasy world, an exotic location here, a bygone era there, an action movie elsewhere.

Although attendance at Hershey Park continued to rise after the war—from 37,000 visitors in 1946 to 740,000 in 1968—the increasingly worn attractions came to seem old-fashioned compared with those at the new theme parks. Some of its features, like a four-pool swimming complex, were prohibitively expensive to maintain, and the park was having trouble simply accommodating the growing crowds. In the 1970s Hershey Estates, which represented the founder’s non-chocolate enterprises (Hershey himself died in October 1945), remodeled the park into a Disney-style theme park, with new rides and landscaping—and an admission fee. A chainlink fence now separated the newly renamed Hersheypark from the rest of the town.

The decision rankled the park’s original beneficiaries, the residents of Hershey. For nearly 70 years, they had enjoyed afternoons rowing on the creek and evenings dancing to bands, all free of charge. Now they felt edged out in favor of tourists and profit. “Milton Hershey was a man of great principle,” a longtime Hershey denizen remarked. “He built this town for a purpose, not for a bottom line. But the company can’t see that.”

From a financial standpoint, of course, the new approach worked. New rides and theatrical productions brought in new business. In 2006, 2,690,000 people visited Hersheypark, the seventeenth-most popular park in America (Disney owns 6 of the top 16; 3 more are in Orlando, home of Walt Disney World). In the century since the town’s founding, a host of changes have altered—some would say endangered—Hershey’s original vision. The company declared the lavish community center an employees-only corporate office in 1980; in 2002 board members of the Milton Hershey School Trust planned to sell their $10 billion controlling interest in Hershey Foods Corporation, stock that has made the town’s residential school for underprivileged children richer than several Ivy League universities. The outcry in Hershey was so overwhelming that in the end the board voted against the sale. If anything, the controversies surrounding each of these events inspired the town’s 13,000 residents to remember the principles their community was founded on. “What would Mr. Hershey do?” remains the local refrain, only occasionally answered, as on a 2002 yard sign, by “Wait ’til Mr. Hershey finds out.”

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.