Pennsylvania: The Sweet History of Hershey with Sharon McMahon

Here's Where It Gets Interesting

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2022

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this solo episode, Sharon sets her sights on the sweet life of Milton S. Hershey and his innovation in the world of chocolate. Today, the Hershey Company produces over a billion pounds of chocolate each year, but its origins are much more humble. Milton Hershey, armed with only four years of elementary education, spent decades learning and honing his chocolate-making craft. His hard work and business acumen led to the company’s rapid success, as well as the growth of an entire town and tourist destination. Hershey is one of the most recognizable and most philanthropic companies in the nation, and it all began on farmland in rural Pennsylvania.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, welcome welcome, always delighted to have you along and I have a very sweet story for you today and I mean that literally very sweet story about the state of Pennsylvania so let's dive it. I'm Sharon
0:17.0	McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I bet you have heard of the Hershey Chocolate Company. I bet you've had a Hershey
0:29.7	kiss, right? I bet you have. Or a Hershey bar, I bet you've had smores. And you know that I could not let the opportunity go by to talk about Milton S Hershey.
0:43.2	The Hershey Company produces over a billion pounds of chocolate every year.
0:48.8	One billion with the B.
0:50.6	That is a lot of chocolate.
0:52.7	By the way, S stands for Snavely, Milton Snavely, Hershey.
0:58.9	Snavely was his mother's main name by the way.
1:00.9	He was born in 1857 to his parents who were named Henry and
1:04.9	Veronica. Veronica went by the nickname Fanny. And Milton was mostly an only
1:10.2	child. He did have a younger sister who died when she was a toddler, but he was raised most of his life as an only child. And the Hershey's were part of the Menonite community in the state of Pennsylvania. So Milton grew up speaking
1:26.1	Pennsylvania Dutch and menonites are Anabaptists. Anabaptism grew out of the Protestant Reformation.
1:37.3	If you look back at the history of their religion, we start with early Christianity under the Roman Empire, etc.
1:45.0	And then the 11th century we have the Great Skism that sort of separates the Orthodox Church from the Catholic Church.
1:51.0	And then in the 16th century we have the Protestant Reformation and out of the Protestant
1:55.1	reformation we have groups like Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Anna Baptism. And some other
2:01.5	Anna Baptist groups you might be familiar with are groups like the Amish. And I already mentioned the Mennonites,
2:07.8	how to write communities, and there are a number of other anabaptist groups and Milton Hershey grew up under one of them.
2:16.5	Mennonites do have unique practices to themselves, but the Mennonite community he grew up in was
2:21.7	not like what you think of when you're thinking of an Amish community where they live in more insulated communities.
2:28.0	The metonite group that he grew up in interacted with the public at large, etc.
2:32.0	So he did, grow up not speaking English
	...

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