Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), June 27, 1911, via newspapers.com.
In hindsight, maybe I was always attracted to Lancaster. I started writing a book about an underemployed teacher and science enthusiast who was born here in the 1870s long before I moved to the county myself and became an un(der)employed historian of science. Growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Dutch Country was the first culturally distinct region you reached upon leaving the metro area. Lancaster was a metonym for “Here be Dragons [pulling buggies].” But my first association with Lancaster County was the Wilbur Bud.
The Wilbur Chocolate Company of Lititz has been around since the late nineteenth century, and is one of several small chocolatiers that survive in the shadow of the Hershey megalith. While Hershey became a global brand by developing shelf-stable chocolates that could be stored and transported worldwide, Wilbur remained a regional delicacy. Arguably, this history is proof of the superiority of the Wilbur Bud—a bite-sized rounded cone of pure chocolate with W I L B U R stamped on its base—to Hershey’s “Kiss,” which sacrifices taste for marketability.1 The superiority of the Wilbur Bud over its commonplace competitor was probably my first exposure to the idea that exclusivity could be evidence of quality—a childhood introduction to the logic of hipsterism.
Yet it wasn’t because of a desire to be cool that I grew up with an affinity for the Bud. For me it was the endorsement of my grandmother, dessert aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire. (Yes, that grandmother.) It was she who first bought Wilbur Buds for me, making a trip to a speciality candy shop that carried them. And—I remember this clearly—it was the only dark chocolate she liked. She was very sensitive to strong flavors and had little taste for bittersweet. But Wilbur Buds were not merely tolerated, but enjoyed. I needed no better recommendation than that.
My grandmother and I never visited the factory or knew much about Lititz, but when our private mythology of Wilbur intersected with news involving the actual company, it became another reminder of our connection with each other. I was thousands of miles away from Pennsylvania in 2008—a continent away from my family and chasing my first full-time academic job—when I read that Barack Obama visited the Wilbur factory during his presidential campaign. It was an occasion to pick up the phone and call her. Later that year, I flew home to Philadelphia to celebrate the city’s first major sports championship since my infancy. The parade was on Halloween, but the only candy I was concerned about was the pound of Wilbur Buds I brought to my grandmother that weekend.2
Philadelphia Inquirer, July 13, 1916, via newspapers.com.
As she grew older and less mobile, our roles reversed. It was always me who brought the Wilbur Buds as a treat when I visited her, first at her home and later at the care facility, where she would immediately offer to share my present with nurses and neighbors. Even though she still enjoyed the chocolates, the opportunity to introduce the experience to others took precedence.
I moved to Lancaster a few years after my grandmother died. By then I hadn’t eaten Wilbur Buds in several years. (I no longer eat dairy, and even the dark buds contain milkfat.) It surprised me a little, upon moving to Lancaster, how little appreciated the Wilbur Bud is here. Though it’s local, it’s not the first thing most people think of when introducing local delicacies to visiting friends. After all, as a region with a longstanding tradition of cultural independence and welcoming refugees from across the globe, Lancaster has no shortage of distinctive foods.3 The cartoonish dragon-drawn buggies at the edges of my childhood mental map have been revised—by living here, by researching its history, much as the city and county have reinvented their own spaces over the centuries. While I’m in the same physical place as people I research from 150 years ago, I’m not in the same mental or cultural space. Perhaps that’s true of my connection to this chocolate. Intangible bittersweet lingers long after the treat is consumed.
Via Wikimedia Commons.
- Peter Kurie, In Chocolate We Trust: The Hershey Company Town Unwrapped (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 78.
- Michael Powell, “Tempting Obama on the Trail,” The Caucus at New York Times, April 1, 2008; Jen A. Miller, “City Stops to Enjoy Parade as Phillies Fans Flood Broad Street,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2008.
- “Lancaster, Pennsylvania: America’s refugee capital” (video), BBC, Jan. 27, 2017.
