Milton Hershey

Milton Snavely Hershey was born on a farm in Pennsylvania to a Mennonite family and left school after the fourth grade. He was apprenticed to a printer but disliked it, and then to a candy maker in Lancaster. His first candy businesses, in Philadelphia, Chicago and New York, failed. Back in Lancaster he succeeded with caramels, and after seeing German chocolate-making machines at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, he decided to make chocolate. He sold his caramel company for a million dollars in 1900 and set out to make milk chocolate cheaply enough for ordinary people, a process the Swiss had kept secret. After much experiment he succeeded, and the Hershey bar and, later, Hershey's Kisses became famous across America. He built a model town around his factory in Derry Township, with houses, schools, parks, a trolley and a zoo, which became Hershey, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Catherine had no children, and in 1909 they founded a school for orphaned boys, to which he later gave most of his fortune. He died in 1945.

Faith: Raised in a Pennsylvania Mennonite family. Source: Wikipedia