One Candy Wrapper Museum Is More Important Than Most Realize

You can find museums for all sorts of weird and wonderful things. While many of these places focus on priceless artifacts with historical or cultural significance, some choose to highlight things that are a little more niche. Take the Candy Wrapper Museum, for instance.

Featuring an immense collection of candy wrappers from decades in the past, it offers an insight into history that people might sometimes overlook. It’s easy to pay little attention to these wrappers in the moment because it’s what’s inside that really matters. However, these casings are relics that can tell us just as much about years gone by as any archaeological find or ancient piece of artwork.

Darlene Lacey spent decades collecting candy wrappers for a future museum

People often make big plans for the future when they’re young. However, there aren’t many who set out the ambitions that Darlene Lacey did when she was a 15-year-old in the 1970s. It was at this age that she decided to start holding onto candy wrappers in the hopes of making a museum out of them one day. Apparently, she was inspired by her friends - who had interesting collections of their own - and the realization that so many different candies exist in the world. She figured that by the time she retired, she’d have enough wrappers to establish a roadside museum that would attract plenty of interest. When others found out what she planned to do, they helped to add to her collection, resulting in her owning hundreds of different wrappers by the turn of the century. It was around then that Lacey acknowledged that she didn’t need to wait until retirement to set up her own museum - she could just build one on the internet.

It took six months to put the museum together online

Setting up a website in the early 2000s wasn’t the easiest task, especially if you planned to build it from the ground up yourself. It reportedly took Darlene around six months to pull this off, with the museum curator reading a book on how to write HTML so she could do the job properly. Part of the reason it took so long was that she had to scan or photograph around 650 wrappers, which she then had to digitally clean to ensure they looked good online. She also arranged the wrappers into themes and wrote lighthearted commentary to ensure that any visitors were suitably entertained by the site. Thankfully, all that effort paid off as it quickly went viral and became Yahoo’s “Funny Site of the Week.” While some people naturally questioned the purpose of a museum like this, many others praised her for offering this nostalgic trip into the world of candy. All of those positive messages assured Darlene that what she was doing was important.

Without Darlene’s collection, a lot of history would be lost

The reason we hold onto artifacts in museums or even in our own homes is because of the history they hold. Without them, our connection to the past can disappear surprisingly quickly. Darlene discovered through her hobby that the candy industry doesn’t actually preserve much of what’s come before, particularly when an acquisition happens. That’s a large part of why her museum is so essential. Without her collection showing the world all the candy wrappers that have come before, we’d simply forget these ever existed. When you combine that with the fact that many people cherish candy when they’re younger and tie a lot of positive memories to this stuff, it’s clear why Lacey’s work matters. The museum owner even met her own husband through her wrapper collection as he was apparently searching for Nice Mice, a candy from his childhood. It turned out this was the first item Darlene had ever collected, and a relationship reportedly blossomed from there.

Darlene received a scrapbook full of Necco memorabilia for her museum

While Lacey has worked hard to build up an impressive collection herself, her museum wouldn’t be nearly as successful without the help of others. One person who has been particularly influential is Jeffrey S. Green, the former vice president of research and development at Necco. It turns out that Green held on to as many artifacts as he could, ultimately creating a scrapbook full of wrappers, photos, promotions, and other goodies that spanned more than a century. When he learned about the Candy Wrapper Museum, he asked Darlene if she was interested in owning the scrapbook, to which the answer was a resounding yes. When the item eventually arrived in the mail, she was astounded by what she now held in her possession. The scrapbook contained pieces that hadn’t been available to the public for the best part of 100 years. Thanks to her museum, she could now share these with the world once again and ensure that this piece of history would never be forgotten.

Darlene’s museum will probably never be able to showcase every single candy wrapper that’s been produced over the years. However, the website serves as an essential piece of history that will always be important, no matter what.