The Candy Shop Where You Can Taste History

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Kelly McEvers: Today we’re going to talk about a candy store in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. And about how candy stores have always played a big role in the town’s history.

Back in the 1840s, a German immigrant named Frederick Roeder set up a little sweet shop in Harpers Ferry. He sold cakes, candies, and pies and lived right upstairs for about 15 years.

But then came the morning of July 4, 1861 .By that time, the Civil War had arrived. Union troops were moving in. Roeder ventured outside his shop to check out the scene. Some say to get a look at the Union flag flying just across the river. He was a Union sympathizer himself. He was hit by a ricocheting bullet. And then he died. Which means the town’s first civilian casualty of the Civil War was the local candy shop owner.

And today, the connection between candy and history is still going strong in Harpers Ferry.

There’s a plaque marking the site of Roeder’s old store. And just a few steps away down a street called Hog’s Alley is a place called True Treats. It’s a candy shop, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.It’s also sort of an edible timeline of the history of candy.

Susan Benjamin : We are not a candy store. We’re a museum where you can eat the displays.

I’m Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today’s episode is brought to you in partnership with the West Virginia Department of Tourism. And today we’re going to eat our history.

We will meet candy scholar Susan Benjamin, who founded what she calls the only research-based historic candy shop in the country.

She’ll introduce us to some surprising sweets that have shaped American history, from abolitionist sugars to World War I’s chocolate energy bars.

That’s coming up after this.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast_: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on_ Apple Podcasts_,_ Spotify_, and all major podcast apps._

Kelly: Susan Benjamin is a candy scholar. So basically, she has the job that every kid dreams about. And it’s no fluke that she ended up in Harpers Ferry.

History buffs will recognize the name. It is where abolitionist John Brown led his famous raid back in 1859. Visitors can still see the armory he raided and lots of Civil War sites. Downtown Harpers Ferry even looks a lot like it did back in the 1800s—narrow streets and old brick buildings.

It’s the perfect place for true treats, which bills itself as the country’s only research-based historic candy store.

Susan : Our retail store is located in a building that opened in 1843 and was part of the Civil War itself. So you can imagine just how beautiful it is, not updated at all other than to keep the building straight.

Kelly : That’s Susan.

Susan: When you walk into our store, people think it’s really cute and really “old-time” and expect to see, “Wow, I’m so happy to see a real retro candy store!” Whoa, no, we’re not retro! We have retro, but we start before then.

Kelly: What Susan calls “retro candy” is stuff you might have found in the Five and Dime store: gummy sharks, lemon sours, tangerine drops, circus peanuts, stuff like that. But at True Treats, there are also older and less familiar sweets: beet sugar crystals, World War I ration bars, medicinal hard candies. In fact, the oldest products on the shelves come from thousands of years ago, like something called pastelli , which looks like peanut brittle, but with sesame seeds. Susan says Homer describes it in The Iliad as a honey and sesame pie.

This is a researcher’s approach to candy. In another life, Susan worked under the Clinton and Bush White Houses on communication initiatives. And before that, she was an academic in Massachusetts.

Susan: I’m from Boston. Who would know?

Kelly: But that was before she came down to West Virginia and fell in love with the history of candy. She’s even written a book on the subject called Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America’s Favorite Pleasure. And she arranges the shop in a very specific way.

Susan: You can start first in history and walk chronologically all the way through the various time periods of candy. The history’s on the label, and what’s really important is that people get an experience of the history of candy because it’s never what they expect.

Kelly: Susan says the way to experience the shop is to walk through, pick out things that interest you, then go sit down in the front of the shop and eat your way through history.

Susan: Often whole families or groups of people sitting around little tables, sampling everything and reading the labels. And if I’m there, I’ll come over, or one of my employees who knows the stories will come over, and we’ll tell them a little bit more about it.

Kelly: There are hundreds of different candies and teas and other sweets in the shop and on their website. So a lot to choose from. But to give you a little sample, let’s just take a quick walk through the timeline of candy history in chronological order.

The oldest section comes first. You’ve got the sesame brittle candies from The Iliad , but also a lot of ingredients native to the Americas. There are candies made with maple sugar. Native Americans were processing maple sap into sugars and sweets long before the Europeans arrived. And…

Susan: … the cacao nib, which is really important because that comes from Mesoamerica and the Native Americans.

Kelly: Chocolate really took off in colonial America, specifically as a hot beverage. In other words, hot chocolate. People would mix it into milk or cream and grate spices on top. Martha Washington made hers out of steeped cacao shells. Susan says that as the Revolutionary War got underway, the drink became political.

Susan: Chocolate was actually a vehicle during the American Revolution in their boycotting of teas, of the British tea, and they needed alternatives. And one of the alternatives was chocolate, and they really pushed, “Everybody’s got to have chocolate. They’ve got to drink that.”

Kelly: In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson even declared that chocolate would one day become a more popular drink than coffee or tea in the U.S. It didn’t happen, but not a bad idea.

Moving on to the 1800s, the Civil War is coming. An intriguing story that pops out from this section also has to do with boycotts. As the country became more and more divided over slavery, people looked for ways to strike at the system economically.

Susan: What happened with the abolitionists is they looked for a number of ways to boycott the economy of slavery, by taking away the produce or finding alternatives to the produce that were funding slavery through its sales, and obviously cane sugar was a big one. So what they did instead was they found alternatives and they promoted those.

Kelly: Groups called “free produce societies” formed and promoted alternatives to cane sugar like honey, corn syrup, and syrup made from a grain called sorghum. The most interesting-looking alternative can be found at True Treats. It comes in a small glass jar and looks almost like golden raisins: these little orange pink crystals.

Susan: Beet sugar! So today, a huge amount of the sugar that we have is actually beet sugar, and that goes in the candy.

Kelly: Moving on to the early 1900s, things start to look a little more recognizable. We start to see candies wrapped up with brand names as industrialization comes to the candy world.

Susan: But at that point you would have things called cough drops, the Pine Brothers cough drops, the Smith Brothers cough drops. Is it a medicine or is it a candy? Well, yes, both, right? And today when we take these Halls or these various medicines that have been around for a really long time, what you’re getting is essentially a candy. So why worry about it, you know, but there was that crossover.

Kelly: There are also some interesting chocolate bars, including some brands that are new to me, like one called Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. It looks a little like a Payday, but it’s made of peanuts and molasses. This one actually has a military connection.

Susan: During World War I, people were making candy bars, and they were called “stuffed chocolate,” but they were basically candy bars that didn’t just have chocolate but had nuts and caramel. And they wound up being in one of the first rations during the First World War.

So they sent Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews and a couple others. They sent it off to the World War I soldiers.They came back saying, “I love these candy bars. These are so great.”

Kelly: Including these chocolate bars in rations wasn’t just for a morale boost. It was meant to be a quick source of energy: high fat, high calorie, easy to eat. And chocolate bars continued to be known for that after the war was over.

Susan: During the Depression, they were marketed as an inexpensive meal in a bar. That’s how they marketed them.

Kelly: Fun fact: The Mr. Goodbar was one of these. It was created by the Hershey Company in 1925 and advertised as a tasty lunch.

By this time, we’re coming back around to the modern age or close to it. This is when we get into the retro candy, the kind of stuff you see at the Five and Dime or in your parents’ or grandparents’ candy dishes: Malted milk balls, rock candy, bubble gum cigarettes (you really don’t see those anymore).

This section, Susan says, is a crowd favorite.

Susan: What they really, really love is when they read the story of the retro candy. And what they do with that, and what they do with eating that is they talk about their grandparents, and they talk about where they lived, and they talk about the candy store on the corner.

Kelly: For Susan, this is what the store is all about: Learning about the past in a new and unusual way.

Susan: It’s a visceral experience of history. When you eat the candies, you know where they’re from, when they’re from, a little bit about the role they played, and then you get to be able to smell, taste, and enjoy it, and get more if you want, you know, it’s that kind of experience.

Kelly: And maybe the next time you have a candy bar, you’ll think about World War I.

True Treats is open daily. They also have an extensive website if you are craving Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews or some of the other interesting sweets we talked about on today’s show.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts_,_ Spotify_, and all major podcast apps._

Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. This episode was produced by Johanna Mayer. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.