During our stay at Thousand Trails Chesapeake Bay (Gloucester, VA) – we visited Yorktown (the battlefield and visitor’s center) and waterfront Yorktown…it was so HOT! We forgot how hot and humid it is in the Southeast! And had my first blue crabs!
until after I took the photo! 🙂
G had to teach me how to open them.
Next, we stayed at a Thousand Trails in Lebanon – very close to Hershey (that sweet town!)
We highly recommend the Hershey Story Museum – lots of information on how Milton & Catherine “Kitty” Hershey formed the town with tree-lined streets, handsome homes, inexpensive public transportation and first-rate public schools. He opened what is now known as Hershey Park (for the recreation of his employees and families) and the nations largest private zoo.
Catherine “Kitty’ Hershey was a force to be reckoned with! She was a working-class girl from western New York and met a rich Lancaster, PA businessman fourteen years older than her at the turn of the 20th century. They fell in love (had a year long courtship), got married (at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC in 1898) and moved to the farmlands of central Pennsylvania. As his company became world-famous, just three years after their marriage, Kitty showed her first signs of the debilitating muscular disease, that would eventually leave her paralyzed.
During her illness Kitty never stopped living life to the fullest. She never let her illness stop her from what she considered her responsibilities and she supervised the construction and landscaping of their new home in Hershey. Their home was not ostentatious and definitely did not reflect millionaire taste of the time.
A friend remembered: “She suffered from a kind of creeping paralysis, but she was very plucky and never made you feel uncomfortable about it. She loved to go and to dress. She loved gaiety and she never complained about her illness.”
Kitty and Milton were at Atlantic City in March 1915, when he was called away on business. Kitty made arrangements to return to Hershey, with a nurse driving her back in a convertible. The numbness in her limbs made Kitty oblivious to the heat and cold, and she insisted on driving with the top down. Her health deteriorated with every mile and by the time they made it to Philadelphia, she was checked into a hospital with pneumonia. Milton hurried to Philadelphia, arriving that same afternoon. After greeting him, Kitty requested a glass of champagne which her husband went personally to get for her. By the time he returned to her room, she had died. He had not realized the extent of her illness. True to form, Kitty had known how ill she was, but had not told anyone, not even Milton. She didn’t want to make a fuss.
Kitty was described as a beautiful woman, graceful and elegant with a bubbly and happy personality. Milton Hershey never remarried. He spent the next thirty years expanding his company and the Milton Hershey School, which he always said was “Kitty’s idea”. I did not know about Catherine “Kitty” Sweeney Hersey before this trip – what a great but short 44 years she lived! And what a legacy!
(this above information is from the Hershey Community Archives)
