In the spring of 1915, in a hotel room in Philadelphia, Catherine Hershey asked her husband for a glass of champagne. He went to get it himself, and before he could return to her side, she was gone. The man standing at the door was Milton Snavely Hershey, one of the wealthiest men in America, with his name on a chocolate company, an entire town in Pennsylvania, and a fortune the newspapers of the day could not begin to calculate. In that hotel room, he lost the only person he had ever truly loved, the reason he had wanted to build everything in the first place.
They had no children. When Hershey died thirty years after his wife, most of his fortune did not pass to a son or daughter. It went to a trust. A few years earlier, he had signed away 5,000 shares of the Hershey Chocolate Company to a school for other people’s boys.
By 2021, when journalists began investigating, they found that the gift had grown beyond imagination. The trust running the school held roughly $17 billion and still controlled the company bearing his name. His bloodline ended with him, but his money did not. The question was not what he gave away.
The question was who the fortune was actually meant for, because the accounts never quite added up. He gave it away in 1918 and told no one for five years. In 1909, he had written a will providing for his wife and relatives. In 1944, he signed a will that left those relatives nothing.
And when the end came, the man who had built an entire town died with almost no personal wealth. His local paper guessed his estate might be worth around $900,000. Two months after his burial, his hearing aid and his mops and cleaning tools were taken to a basement and sold to strangers. He had not always been the solitary man standing at doors.
He had once been a traveling caramel salesman and a bachelor until age forty. In 1897, in Jamestown, New York, Hershey walked into a confectionery to sell his caramels. A group of young women stood by the counter, and among them was his future wife. Her sister later recalled that the girls gathered in the shop and made a fuss.
That was how her sister met the man from Pennsylvania. Courting her was difficult. He hated writing letters and instead sent telegrams, which infuriated her. Catherine often said she had never seen anyone who hated writing letters so much.
Despite that, in the spring of 1898, he married her in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. He was forty years old, and no family stood beside them. His mother was not pleased.
Fanny Hershey was a simple Mennonite woman who found her new daughter-in-law proud and haughty. Within four months, her son bought his mother a separate house to keep the peace. That was how he solved problems. He spent money on the people around him, and now he had plenty of it.
When he built a mansion called High Point for Catherine, their wealth had risen dramatically. The house and grounds probably cost around $100,000. At the same time, George Vanderbilt had spent an estimated $10 million on Biltmore and employed ninety servants. High Point ran on just three or four staff.
Hershey was rich, but not that rich, and he never wanted to be. He brought his wife fresh flowers every day, and she called him her little Dutchman. Inside the house they had separate rooms, hers pink, his gold with blue carpet. The trouble began around 1902, four years into the marriage.
At a train station in Philadelphia, Catherine collapsed. She wrote to a friend that she thought she should wear a tag around her neck like lost luggage. Doctors called it locomotor ataxia. No one could say exactly what it was, and no known disease has ever fully matched it.
A woman who knew her described it as a slow-spreading paralysis and said Catherine endured it without complaint, still loving to dress up and go out, never making anyone uncomfortable. They had no children, and no record explains why. The family always considered it the greatest disappointment of their lives. So Hershey did something strange for a man with no heir.
In 1909, he and Catherine signed a trust deed and established a school. Not a school for their own child, because they had none, but a school for orphaned boys. They donated roughly 486 acres of farmland in Pennsylvania. A year later, the first students arrived, four of them, two pairs of brothers, housed in the very farmhouse where Hershey had been born.
The deed spelled out how the boys were to be raised. They would eat plain, nourishing food and wear plain clothes so that no one could tell orphans apart by their coats. Two years later, the first teacher was hired. By the end of the decade, the school had 120 students.
Just before founding the school, Hershey had signed another document, a will. That 1909 will provided for his wife, friends, and relatives, and set aside 3,000 shares of his company for the school. By 1911, his wealth had grown so much that he booked passage on the Titanic. That December, he wrote a $300 check to the White Star Line as a deposit on a first-class cabin.
Such a room cost between $3,000 and $4,000, so his $300 was a one-tenth deposit securing his place at sea. He never sailed on that ship. Business called him back to Pennsylvania before it departed. Instead, he traveled on a German liner called the Amerika, and Catherine did not go with him.
She stayed in Europe. He reached New York on a Saturday and returned to his town the next day to tell friends the story of his narrow escape. The captain of the Amerika, it was said, had sent a warning to the Titanic about icebergs on the same route. Two years later, the couple was photographed in front of the Giza pyramids.
Catherine sat in a car because her legs could no longer carry her. By the end of the following year, the paralysis had nearly consumed her. She knew it, and when the doctors gave up, she turned to Christian Science. Her last car ride came in March 1915.
They were in Atlantic City when business called Hershey away. Catherine arranged for a new nurse to take her home in an open convertible. Because of the paralysis, she could not feel heat or cold, and she insisted the top stay down. The day was harsh and cold.
With every mile her condition worsened, until they could go no further and stopped at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. It was a hotel, not a hospital. She had pneumonia, and someone sent for her husband. He arrived on Thursday afternoon, March 25.
Catherine welcomed him and asked for a glass of champagne. He went to get it himself, and she died before he returned. She had not known how close the end was. He knew and told no one, not even her.
At her funeral, he said something to her sister that explains the next thirty years. I never expected to marry, he told her. He gave every person under him the day off and paid their train fare to Philadelphia so they could attend. And then he could not let her go.
Her body lay in a vault in Philadelphia for four years. All that time, he sent fresh flowers several times a week, the same flowers he had given her in life. He made a rule for himself and kept it: he would be kind to small children and elderly women, but to no other woman. Until his death, he carried her picture in his pocket every day.
For thirty years, the people of his town knew him as a widower who never remarried. Three years after Catherine was finally buried, Hershey made the decision that turns the entire story. He decided to set his will in motion while he was still alive. First, he created a vehicle for the gift.
In January 1918, he combined every separate part of his business, the chocolate, the sugar, the land, into a single company and transferred about 7,695 acres into it. Then, on November 13, 1918, he signed over 5,000 shares of that company, the bulk of his entire fortune, to the trust of the orphan boys’ school. He explained himself in a single sentence: I have no heirs, he said. No children.
So I decided to make the orphan boys of the United States my heirs. And then he did something no one has ever explained. He told no one. He gave away the greater part of his fortune and kept it secret for five years, so that the public did not learn what he had done until the autumn of 1923.
Eight days after the share transfer, his company accepted a government war order for two million half-pound chocolate bars for soldiers overseas by Christmas. The money-making machine kept running, though the man who owned it had already given it away without telling anyone. The problem came almost immediately, and it came from the very thing he had just donated. Hershey had built a second empire in Cuban sugar to supply his chocolate.
In 1920, sugar prices collapsed. From 22 cents a pound in May, the price fell to 1. 3 cents the following January. It was such a total crash that his losses ranged between $2.
5 million and $7 million, depending on whose accounting you trusted. To grasp the scale, Coca-Cola lost $2 million that year, and Pepsi nearly went bankrupt. Hershey survived, but not on his own terms. The shock was so severe that he was forced to hand control of his businesses in both Pennsylvania and Cuba to the National City Bank of New York.
The bank issued nearly $20 million in Hershey bonds, placed a mortgage on his properties, and sent in its own agent to run the place, a man Hershey could not stand. The fortune he had signed over to a school for orphans two years earlier was now mortgaged to a New York bank, and he had no ownership power left to protect it. He had given the shares away, but the debt stayed with him, and he fought his way back. By late 1921, he had the company profitable again, and the bank withdrew its man.
But those two years hung over everything that followed. He had made the boys his heirs, and they came within a hair of losing the inheritance before they ever saw a dollar. Grief kept creating things in his life, and the next thing it created was a cemetery. Catherine had wanted a cemetery for the town, and after her death Hershey set about building a burial ground for his family and himself.
Stone dealers tried to sell him a grand mausoleum. He turned it down and chose a single block of marble with only one word carved on it, Hershey, for which he paid $19,000. Beneath it, flat markers lay in the ground. He divided the grounds into sections and set aside a portion for the boys of his school.
In 1923, he transferred the entire cemetery to a small company he owned for exactly one dollar. He could not even bring his own family together in that soil. When he tried to move his relatives there, he could not bring them all because the grave of his only sister, a little girl named Serena who died at age four, could no longer be found. And the first person buried in the ground where he built a cemetery for his wife was not family.
It was an orphan boy from his own school, a child named Charles Schwartz, who died in the influenza that swept the country in 1918. The pattern was set. Under the stone, Hershey said, lay his wife, his mother, his father, and the empty space of a sister who could not be found. His wife returned to that ground in 1919, four years after the hotel.
His mother joined her the next spring, and that autumn his father’s body was brought from an old meeting house yard. There was no next generation to fill the plots. The first small coffin lowered there belonged to another man’s child. The money he could not leave to a child, he spent on the town.
Through the 1930s, he spent it as if trying to make himself poor before death. In 1930, he gave away the High Point mansion he had built for Catherine and turned it into a golf course clubhouse, keeping only two rooms for himself on the second floor. The course’s fifth hole sits where his own front lawn used to be. Then, in the hardest years of the Great Depression, when everyone else was shutting down, he started building.
He put up a grand hotel, a sports arena, a stadium, a theater, a community building, an office block, pouring more than $10 million into the town in those years. When his foreman showed him two steam shovels that could each do the work of forty men, the story around town was that Hershey looked at the machines and said, take them away and hire those forty men. Whether he used those exact words is unknown, but it fit his character. He wanted the work spread among people.
He kept giving everything else away too. After Catherine’s death, he created a garden in what had been a field, with a rose garden, and told the man who arranged it that the more beautiful the place became, the better people’s lives would be. When that man once asked how large the garden was planned to be and whether he needed a cost estimate, the old man stopped him. He said, if it gets too big, I will stop you.
But I have not stopped you yet. Have I? In one summer, he gave $20,000 to each of the town’s five churches. That same autumn, he bought the entire collection of old Pennsylvania crafts from a dead man’s estate, as if a man with no descendants could buy an heir.
But a monument can never be an heir. The community building he was proudest of never once earned a profit. Above its great stone fireplace hung his own portrait. While he was still alive, the old man walked beneath his own image in a building no child of his would ever inherit.
Then the town he built turned against him. On an April morning in 1937, a union leader named Russell Baman stood outside the chocolate factory and waved a red handkerchief. The machines that had run for generations of workers fell silent. The buildings went quiet.
People climbed onto chocolate avenue rooftops and the factory roof. They flew their union flags instead of the American flag. The strike hit something this countryside could not afford to lose. The dairy farmers who sold milk to Hershey lost 800,000 pounds of milk a day.
Milk enough to supply a town was being wasted with nowhere to go. The number of strikers ranged from two hundred to four hundred, depending on who was counting. What no one disputed was how it ended. On the morning of April 7, six days later, more than 3,000 loyal workers and farmers gathered at the factory by 11 a.
m. and gave the strikers until 1 p. m. to leave.
When one o’clock came, they went in with bats and clubs and drove them out. People bled on the floor of the factory that fed the whole town. The bitterest part was who they were fighting. The strikers faced a man who was not the founder.
He was nearly eighty, and control of the company had passed to his executives. So the workers were not fighting the old man who built the factory but the hard company president, William Murrie. A federal recovery act had limited working hours, and for many in town, weekly pay had fallen to almost nothing. Hershey had invested more than $10 million in the town for these people.
In those same years, the company had earned more than $37 million in profit while cutting their hours. Those closest to him said it destroyed him. The town he saw as a family had become a battlefield, and he was too old to stop it. Five months after his workers bloodied one another in his name, those same workers organized his birthday celebration.
It was his eightieth. They filled the stadium with six to eight thousand people and brought a three-foot-tall cake with eighty candles. With about $900 left over from the party, they bought him a gold ring with diamonds set around the image of a baby inside his company’s cocoa shell symbol, and he wore it until he died. A year later, on his eighty-first birthday, those same workers gave him a red rose for every year of his life, calling them in a note a token of their devotion and love.
A few months before that, in the summer of 1938, the only surviving recording of his voice was made for a radio program. He was eighty, reading answers from cards. How long have you been in the candy business? the host asked.
Sixty years, he said. And about his boys, he said this: we take care of them until they get a job. They may not earn as much as others, he added, but they will live happily. He was a man who preferred to stay out of sight.
He left almost no letters and never wrote a memoir. Sometimes he traveled under a false name so no one would make a fuss over him. He used the name M. S.
Hall, and a month after his death, the paperwork for traveler’s checks issued in that name was still being settled. 1939 was the last year the town celebrated his birthday as a public event. After that, he marked his birthdays with small private dinners with his executive officers and their wives. There were no children at those tables, and there never had been.
By the autumn of 1944, he was eighty-seven and had finished his work. On September 29, he signed a new will. His earlier will from 1909 had provided for his wife, friends, and relatives. This last will provided nothing for any personal relative.
The blood relatives named in the earlier will were all excluded. This was not the sudden decision of a man with no family left. It was a written, witnessed decision that left his remaining wealth to the school and the town, and nothing to his kin. Six days later, he let go of everything.
On October 5, he resigned as chairman of his three boards: the chocolate company, the trust company, and the school. He handed the whole responsibility to his successor, and he was not the expected man. Many in town assumed the long-serving company president would take over. Instead, he gave it to Percy Alexander Staples, an engineer from Portland, Maine, who had managed the Cuban operations since the bank crisis and was little known in Hershey at the time.
He handed his life’s work to a capable stranger because he had no one of his own to give it to. One birthday remained. On September 13, 1945, his eighty-eighth, Hershey decided to have his birthday dinner in the farmhouse room where he had been born. He ordered one thing brought into that room and set beside the table: his own cradle, in which he had been rocked as an infant eighty-eight years before.
Thirteen people sat at that table with him. Two of them were named Hershey. Neither was his son. Both were company executives.
A month later, on October 13, 1945, at the age of eighty-eight, he died in the hospital in his town. The cause of death is not clear in the records. By then, his school for orphaned boys had nearly a thousand students. On the day he died, his own town’s weekly paper printed nothing about him.
The front page was dominated by a hockey game at the arena. A man can build an entire town and still die on a very ordinary day. On October 16, a bright autumn afternoon, he was buried in the cemetery he had built, beside Catherine, his mother, and his father. That morning, his body had lain in the rotunda of his school for orphans.
An estimated 10,000 people came to pay their respects. The great marble monument with the single word carved on it was so covered with roses, chrysanthemums, and orchids that the name beneath was barely visible. Those flowers came from his friends. The man who had sent fresh flowers to his wife’s grave for thirty years was finally buried beneath flowers others had sent.
And then eight boys lifted his coffin onto their shoulders. They were senior students from his school, orphans, each chosen from the class that would graduate the following spring. Their names were John Albright, Clyde Harman, Rom Ovens, Elwood Shive, Stephen Skelick, Kenneth Stein, William Swingle, and Wilmer Wolf. Eight boys who had lost their own fathers carried him to his grave.
The man who had made himself their benefactor, who had devoted his whole life to other people’s children, had once said he would make the orphan boys of America his heirs. In the end, it was the other way around. The heirs carried him. People of every kind mourned him.
A half dozen leaders of different faiths took part in his funeral, fitting for the man who, when asked his religion, replied that it was the Golden Rule. Among the words spoken in his memory was a message from Gordon Rentschler, chairman of the National City Bank of New York, the same bank that had once seized his companies and placed its own man over him. Hershey, he wrote, measured his success not in dollars but in the good those dollars could do for others. The last act of his estate took place in a basement.
His executors, the three men he had named in his will, settled his personal affairs, and among those affairs were the contents of his own rooms. On December 17 and 18, 1945, two months after the funeral, they held an auction in the basement of the community building he had given to the town. The announcement leaflet still survives. It called the sale unrestricted.
It opened for public viewing so that anyone could come and inspect the goods and then bid on them. Two months after the old man was laid in the ground, his china and bronzes were put on public display one Saturday and Sunday, with the auction beginning Monday. Alongside the fine china, paintings, and bronzes were the ordinary furnishings of an old man’s life. The list included mops and brushes, pots and pans, clothes baskets, copper boilers, opera glasses, Dresden porcelain, and his hearing aid.
The entire auction brought in just over $17,000. His personal property, the money that had actually belonged to him in the end, was so small that his own town’s newspaper could only estimate it at around $900,000. A friend once joked that his balance sheet was empty, and Hershey answered, my name is still with me, and that should be worth something. The accounts must be kept separate, because the real truth of this story lies in the space between them.
The orphan’s inheritance was entirely separate from his own personal property. The newspapers that autumn reported that nearly $84 million had been given to the boys’ school. That was their figure, the media number for 1945, far removed from his personal $900,000 and from the $5,000 shares signed in 1918. Four different piles of money spread across three different decades.
No child was waiting for any of them. So who got the fortune in the end? The honest answer is that no person did. A dead man’s trust did.
His school is now the richest institution of its kind in the country, with assets of about $17 billion by the journalists’ accounting in 2021. The entity behind that wealth still controls 80 percent of the voting stock of the chocolate company. It spends around $139,000 per year on each of its roughly 2,100 students. Looking at all this, it is easy to say the man won.
A dead man still controls the company he built. His gift has surpassed every gift left by his rivals. From that view, nothing was lost. But that explanation is backwards.
What the Hersheys lost was never the chocolate company. The company is doing well and will outlast all of us. What they lost was their bloodline. The reason this fortune has gone untouched for a hundred years, the reason the principal can never be spent, is that the man who bound it so tightly had no heir.
The document is a monument to an emptiness. He wrote it that way because no child ever came. Search the whole story for a descendant and you will not find one. The 1909 will provided for his relatives.
The one he signed in 1944 provided for no one. Of the three men who settled his estate, the one bearing his name was not his son. The two Hersheys at his final birthday table were his executives. The eight boys who carried his coffin were other people’s children.
He carried for thirty years the picture of a wife lost in that Philadelphia hotel room. That wife had first dreamed of the school, and that school now teaches girls as well as boys, with one hall still bearing her name. The school for small children also bears her name. Both began long after she and her husband were gone.
No child of hers is attached to either one or to a single dollar of the fortune. That was the price of it all. She paid it in full, and there was no one behind her to inherit the money or the loss.