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Rogue’s Roost Candy Company: Our History

 * The Early Years**

While Roland “Cobbler” Reck’s small shoe-repair business in the early 1920s was enough to sustain him and his future family, his heart lay elsewhere: with the candies he made and with the girl who adored them. Dorothy Garret’s sweet tooth was known throughout town, and it was Cobbler’s homemade pretzel-peanut chocolate fudge that won her heart.

At Dorothy’s urgings, Roland began selling his decadent fudge right out of his cobbler shop shortly after he and Dorothy married in 1926. Folks would come into his shop for a new sole on their wingtips and leave with a pound of his special pretzel-peanut chocolate fudge; needless to say, the demand for his fudge soon outweighed the demand for his shoe-repairing prowess.

Within a year, during the summer of 1927, Cobbler put down his family trade, trading in pliers for spatulas. Reck’s Shoe Repair became Rogue’s Roost Candy Company, so named for the legend of Roland’s great-great-grandfather, Oscar Von Reckenstuggel—the man supposedly responsible for Hanover’s unique nomenclature in the late 1700s (but that is another tale).

By 1928, Cobbler needed a larger facility to create his confectionary delights, so Rogue’s Roost Candy Company relocated to a small factory on Maple Avenue in Hanover—just a stone’s throw from where Cobbler grew up—where the company resides today, 81 years later.


 * The Dutchie Is Born**

Cobbler called upon his Pennsylvania Dutch heritage and his famous pretzel-peanut chocolate fudge to create his first large-scale production candy bar—The Dutchie—eight years later...