Milton Hershey’s Utopian Amusement Park Turns 100
By Christine Gibson
American Heritage Press
April 24, 2007
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.
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.”
