Built of Stone: The Family of Milton S. Hershey constructs a Pennsylvania German Cultural Landscape

Vernacular architecture is an analytical category of housing referring to ordinary buildings and landscapes whose form and function is based on local needs, local construction materials, and local methods of construction. This definition implies that form and function will change little over time, but greatly over space, since the vernacular represents the belief patterns of the tradition that produced it. Because the concept of a vernacular suggests a shared sense of identity within a cultural group, traditional inquiries into vernacular objects have been largely focused on "reading" buildings and landscapes as anonymous texts and as tangible manifestations of shared values and behaviors. Despite recent scholarly efforts to expand traditional areas of inquiry into a methodology less focused on an analysis of form and function to one emphasizing the transmission of societal values over time through performance, the motivations of individuals in designing and placing architecture on the landscape over time remain relatively absent from scholarship.;This dissertation interprets the interrelationship between architecture and individual identity, the relationship of buildings to individuals in contemporary society, as well as the meaning individuals attach to the environments they associate with their past through the lens of a single family. In this study of a narrowly defined Pennsylvania German landscape, I will use Milton S. Hershey and the physical landscape and legacy he created in the town of Hershey as an example of a successful negotiation between tradition and modernity in a changing industrialized landscape. In creating his model community, Milton Hershey not only realized the creation of a Pennsylvania German cultural landscape, but managed to both transform and modernize that idea through change as well as continuity.;In realizing his vision of the model company town, Milton Hershey's abundant resources and unique brand of practical idealism allowed him to create a physical landscape that incorporated the adaptive reuse of existing properties (including some built by members of the Hershey family) as well as the construction of new buildings. While Pennsylvania German cultural identity continued to evolve and adapt to New World circumstances throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cultural landscape constructed by Milton Hershey embodied his own sense of Pennsylvania German cultural identity as well as that of a majority of those already living in the area, even as many of those traditions and customs were absorbed into an emerging national popular culture in the twentieth century. By appealing to regionally linked traditions and existing societal values, Hershey used the vernacular to help negotiate between a past legacy of Pennsylvania German rural settlement and an industrial future.;In the early twenty-first century, Hershey residents continue to struggle with the meaning and relevance of their Pennsylvania German heritage constructed, as it were, through the lens of the Hershey family. Born in 1857, just before the Civil War, into a traditional Pennsylvania German family, Hershey passed away in 1945, only a few months after the end of World War II. Milton Hershey and the community he created are ideally suited to this query---his life, because it straddled the transformation of America from an agricultural to industrial society; his town, because it continues to wrestle with the legacy of its founder and the meaning of place in a modern post-industrial society. As the cultural landscape of the Hershey area continues to be transformed and recreated by competing identities, I argue that the vernacular plays a major role in determining the overall appearance of the physical landscape of any community by allowing individuals an outlet to express their identity, values, and ways of looking at the world and to give physical material shape to their intentions through buildings.