Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip

3. Bursting the Seams

3 Bursting the Seams Such periods of expansion, a sort of flowering season, have occurred over and over in the history of life among various groups successively. George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution As hard as it is to trace the potato chip’s origin, it is even more of a challenge to trace its dispersal in the half decade after 1853. We know that immediately after its invention at Moon’s Lake House, “Saratoga chips” were served there nightly in baskets—or “paper cornucopias”—at tables, a custom that spread to the other Saratoga hotel restaurants, and then likely spread farther into surrounding New York State, Pennsylvania, and New England. In a 1970s interview an executive of a chip company suggested that a caterer named Fleeper, who supplied box lunches to excursion boat passengers between Boston and Nahant, was the first to sell potato chips outside of Saratoga Springs. Without dates this information is hard to verify, but it is also likely that chips simultaneously radiated outward into towns proximate to Saratoga Springs, where they would also have been served in restaurants at first. In addition to restaurants, stores dispensed potato chips from barrels or glass cases and into bags. Stores of the time were not self-service— that development became widespread only after the Second World War. In addition to groceries and restaurants, fairs, farmers’ markets, bars, and bakeries were sellers’ opportunities. “Each summer, the family would pack up and set off for the fairs,” wrote Leslie C. Mapp in his account of Mike-sell’s Potato Chips, Dayton, Ohio. “They lived in a tent 22 and sold from a glass case filled with potato chips, with the children soon developing an unerring knack for knowing how large a scoopful would fill a five-cent bag.” Mose Mesre of Conn’s Potato Chips, Zanesville, Ohio, says that Mrs. Conn sold chips in “old beer joints and things like that. And everybody wanted more and more, and she could only give ’em so much, and that’s why she did it [sold out to a factory operation].” At some point, potato chips moved from a humble kitchen-cooked product to factory production, but naming a single creator for mass production of potato chips in the context of late nineteenth-century commerce would be like naming Fats Domino or Bill Haley or Elvis as the single creator of rock ’n’ roll. Nonetheless, one person who comes up in any article about early potato chip history is William Tappenden of Cleveland, Ohio. Accounts from the Snack Food Association mention Tappenden and his horse-drawn wagon as “a familiar figure on Cleveland ’s streets.” In 1895 he was among the first to take chips out of the kitchen and into a factory setting, where he “converted a barn at the rear of his house into one of the first potato chip factories.” It is likely that every city in the eastern half of the United States at the turn of the century had its own version of William Tappenden. Part of the reason we know about Tappenden, and not the others, may be his Ohio connection. In 1931 a loose group of Ohio chippers united as the Ohio Chip Association under the charismatic leadership of Harvey Noss, sales manager of Noss Pretzel and Cone company. Today known as the Snack Food Association (SFA), the group at first was laden with Ohio chippers, many of whom probably knew Tappenden personally. And if Ohio was—and is—a place of chip diversity, so was—and is—Pennsylvania. Today, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has the greatest density of independent potato chip companies in the United States. One of these, Original Good’s Potato Chips—not to be confused with Ralph Good’s Potato Chips, a distant family relative in the same county—appears to be the oldest extant chipper in the country. Dating to 1886, Original Good’s predates Tappenden in Cleveland by nine years. Until its recent merger, a wall inside Original Good’s twelvethousand -square-foot metal building showcased photos from five generations of Goods, starting with founder Anna Good, in a tinted photo and wearing a Mennonite prayer cap, next to a photo of Lewis and Lynn Good, the present owners. The legend is that Anna Good started Bursting the Seams 23  cooking potato chips in her kitchen, later moving to a small shed for a factory. From conversations...