Milton Hershey School

Boarding school for disadvantaged children, Milton Hershey's most lasting legacy

Milton Hershey's most lasting legacy isn't the chocolate — it's the school he founded in 1909, a free boarding school for children from low-income families. Students live in cottage-style homes on the sprawling campus east of downtown Hershey, with all costs covered including tuition, housing, food, clothing, and medical care.

The campus itself is striking: a formal Georgian-style administration building, a working farm, athletic facilities, and several hundred acres of grounds. The school does not offer public tours, but the grounds are visible from the surrounding roads, and the High Point Mansion where Milton and Catherine Hershey once lived occasionally opens for events. The broader story — that Hershey essentially gave his chocolate fortune to fund an orphanage — is told at the Hershey Story Museum nearby.

things to do sight historic house
A story
Milton Hershey had no children of his own. In 1909 he and his wife Catherine quietly signed over the deed to their chocolate company to fund a school for orphaned boys — a transfer so large that when it became public in 1923, Wall Street analysts initially refused to believe a businessman had given away that much wealth. The school now enrolls around 2,000 students and the trust remains one of the largest in the United States.