Hershey, PA

Hershey smells of chocolate, by design. Milton S. Hershey, the caramel-maker's apprentice who perfected milk chocolate for the masses, built his factory in a Pennsylvania cornfield in 1903 — and around it, deliberately, a model town for his workers: tree-lined avenues named Chocolate and Cocoa, parks, schools and streetlights shaped like Hershey's Kisses, which still light the way today. When the Depression came, Hershey refused to lay men off; his "Great Building Campaign" set them to work raising a grand hotel, a sports arena, a community centre and the sumptuous Hershey Theatre of 1933, whose Venetian-Byzantine interior of polished lava rock and gold remains one of Pennsylvania's most opulent stages, hosting Broadway tours, orchestras and recitals ever since.

The founder's deepest legacy is quieter: childless, Hershey secretly transferred his entire fortune to the Milton Hershey School for orphaned and disadvantaged children, which remains the controlling owner of the chocolate empire — a candy company run, in the end, for a school. The town he built entertains millions at Hersheypark, grown from the workers' picnic grounds into a great amusement park, and Hersheypark Stadium and the Giant Center bring the touring world to town. Utopian, paternal and faintly surreal, Hershey is American industrial idealism preserved in cocoa butter.