Looking Back
A family visit starts the Beals on a journey that leads to lots of peeled potatoes.
Making potato chips during the Great Depression.
Before my greatgrandparents John and Grace Beal moved to a farm in the White Horse Mountain area in the 1940s, they lived in a little town named Berlin, Pennsylvania.
A visit to Aunt Sadie Hostetler introduced the Beal family to a new way to make potatoes. Aunt Sadie sliced the potatoes very thin and quickly fried them in lard. She called them potato chips. The Beals had never had chips before, but they loved them! They couldn’t wait to get home and try to make more of this delicious and unique family recipe.
At the beginning of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the local coal mines closed and there was no work for John to support his family. The Beals thought that perhaps others would like potato chips as much as they did, and at that moment a business was born.
They bought potatoes from local farmers. Grace and their daughter, Carmen, peeled about 400 pounds of potatoes by hand. They soaked the potatoes in cold spring water to make them nice and crisp before slicing them. They placed the slicer over the top of a lard can so the slices would fall right in. Each pass over the slicer produced four chips—also done by hand. Then they dried the slices before quickly frying them on an old coal-fired cookstove in the kitchen.
A special pan covered the entire stovetop. The stove lids were removed so the fire’s heat would press right against the pan, which made the lard in the pan sizzling hot for frying.
It took only a few short minutes in the hot lard to make chips. Grace removed the fried chips with a special wire mesh dipper and drained them, salted them and packed them into empty lard cans with a tight lid to keep the chips fresh and crispy.
John then stacked several filled cans in the car and delivered them in town to the local stores. Grocers scooped the chips out by hand and placed them into a brown paper bag that sold for 25 cents a pound.
In 1937, the new high school in Berlin opened and the school’s snack bar sold Beal potato chips. The family continued producing chips until 1947, when Snyder’s built a potato chip factory in
Berlin, immediately putting them out of business.
Eighty years ago snack foods were very scarce, and the Beals had no competition until Snyder’s came to town. Today, when you walk down the grocery store’s snack aisle, there are endless options of potato chip brands and flavors. Times sure have changed! But it’s exciting to know that my great-grandparents introduced in our corner of Pennsylvania something that would become an iconic snack.