Welcome to our week of digital trick-or-treating at the Leventhal Map and Education Center! Every day this week we'll make a stop on our candy tour of Greater Boston.
There were many candy manufactories in Greater Boston in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1/7

If we walked the streets, we'd smell the sweet air around these places. They'd be pleasant pockets within the overall stench of the city in that time. Using urban atlases of Boston in #Atlascope and historical documents in @digicomMA, we can imagine how these industries... 2/7

shaped their neighborhoods.

John Hannon began producing some of the earliest chocolate products in the US in 1765 in Milton, MA. Several years later, the company moved to Dorchester. Chocolate could only be produced in colder weather because of melting. 3/7

Early mills functioned as grist, wool, paper, and saw mills during other parts of the year.
Walter Baker was the third generation of Bakers to own the factory – his grandfather had bought it from Hannon's widow in 1780. 4/7

The last familial owner of Baker’s Chocolate was Walter's step-nephew, Henry L. Pierce. Pierce sold out the company for incorporation in 1895. After his death in 1896, the square outside the buildings was named in his memory. 5/7

This handbill for Baker's is undated, but must have been produced shortly after the 1867 and 1873 European Expositions it references, at which the company won prizes. 6/7

The ad card, a common type of advertising from the time, is from ca. 1870-1900. 7/7