The Jell-O Gallery & Museum in LeRoy, NY
This is no corporate-run promotion. This is a town’s act of love and pride.
“Pearle Wait was a young man in town,” explains Jell-O Museum director and curator Lynne Belluscio. “He was a carpenter and, like a lot of other people in our town, he dabbled.” In Wait’s case, he dabbled in, “laxative teas, cough medicines and stuff. I don’t know what it was about LeRoy, but it just seemed that was a business you could get into. You could package up something and sell it door to door.” The year was 1897. “Nobody really knows why he decided to package gelatin, coloring, flavoring, and sugar,” she says. But he did, and trademarked it under the name that his wife, May, gave it: Jell-O.
The magic was that Wait was one of several concoctors who had come up with an easy way to make something that had previously been laborious and costly to do. Belluscio explains, “The boiling up of animal parts and straining that, then adding expensive sugar, fruit juice, and colorings that were all hard to get hold of,” so gelatin desserts were within the domain of the rich only.
To this day, Jell-O is still a fascinating alchemy. What you’re doing when you make Jell-O is breaking down a triple helix, then re-forming it into a mess of polypeptide tangles in a gelatinous formation that holds its shape but includes enough watery gaps to create the jolly jiggle.
“We like to say that it really democratized an elitist food. But, apparently, Pearle Wait wasn’t terribly good at selling that story,” Belluscio says. After two years, Jell-O wasn’t selling. Belluscio goes on to explain that another young, self-made entrepreneur in LeRoy, Orator Woodward, purchased the rights to the Jell-O trademark from Wait for $450. It took another couple of years, but Woodward became much better at promotion.
Much better, indeed. He sent out sartorially appealing salesmen in spiffy, horse-drawn wagons to gather crowds, sell the Jell-O, and give out free recipe books. When the free books had been distributed, he was then able to sell grocery store owners on the notion that the public would be arriving, looking for more of the product to use for the recipes.
He also got ads into the top magazines of the day. Thus begins the resonant history of Jell-O, told in this tiny, one-room museum, owned and run entirely by the LeRoy Historical Society, and located a little over a three-hour drive from Binghamton, the concentric center of Off the Beat’s focus.
“The story to be told,” Belluscio says, “is the fact that the people who owned Jell-O […] were able to promote it so that it became America’s most famous dessert,” and to the point that the word “jello” became a generic for sweet gelatins. “We hope people will leave understanding a little bit more about the power of advertising.”
On the 100th anniversary of the dessert, in 1997, the Jell-O Gallery began with a small collection of glorious oil paintings depicting the gelatinous delight in advertising. (Some of the greatest names in illustration such as Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish and, later, cartoonists such as Syd Hoff and Hank Ketcham were hired to create for Jell-O.) If visitors follow the Jell-O Brick Road – a brick pathway leading past the Historic LeRoy House to the museum cottage – they come to the gallery which is now loaded with Jell-O artifacts. There are scavenger hunts for the children; a vehicle exhibit downstairs; a brief, dense, and entertaining Jell-O history lecture; a fun gift shop; and an invitation to leave one’s own Jell-O story.
The Jell-O plant left LeRoy in 1964 and though it is today owned by Kraft Heinz Company and located in Mason City, Iowa, Jell-O is still held in a wiggly embrace by its birthplace. Townspeople have told tales of how the creek behind the plant used to flow in the color of the Jell-O flavor of the week when the tanks were flushed.
Admitting that she probably makes Jell-O more often than the average person, “I made grape last night,” Belluscio shares. This extremely sensible woman becomes dreamy for a moment as she unexpectedly comments, “I just did a phenomenal Jell-O shot recipe with root beer!”
Laughing heartily, she adds, “The whole experience of what you can do with Jell-O shots is truly amazing.” But you probably already knew that.
