Sweet Home Big Flats: The Story of DeMet’s Turtles and Their New York Connection

 

by Karen Meade, CCHS Volunteer

If you're ever passing through Chemung Valley on 1-86 or walking on the Sperr Memorial Park trail and catch a faint, chocolatey sweetness in the air, you'll know where it's coming from. Big Flats candy lovers have a small piece of American confectionery history, the place where a century-old Chicago dream found a new home in upstate New York.

CCHS Collection

There’s a good chance you’ve bitten into a DeMet’s Turtle at some point in your life, that perfect little cluster of crunchy pecans, gooey caramel, and silky chocolate,and never once wondered where it came from. If you live in the Southern Tier of New York, the answer might be closer than you think.

1929, Chicago Historical Society

The story of DeMet’s Turtles begins not in New York, but in Chicago, Illinois, where candy maker George DeMet opened a shop on Madison Street in 1898. It was a classic American confectionery dream: a candy store and soda fountain where George crafted sweets by hand and built a loyal neighborhood following. By 1916, he had struck upon something truly special. It was a cluster of pecans draped in caramel and dipped in chocolate. The shape, with pecan “legs” poking out from the chocolate shell, reminded someone of a little turtle crawling across a marble board. The name stuck, and an American candy icon was born.

The Turtles brand passed through several hands over the decades, eventually landing with Nestlé in 1988, before being acquired in 2007 by Brynwood Partners, a private equity firm that resurrected the dormant DeMet’s Candy Company name and set about building something new.

When the newly reconstituted DeMet’s Candy Company began searching for a U.S. manufacturing home, they cast a wide net across the northeastern states, looking at New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. What they found in Big Flats, a small community in Chemung County just outside Elmira, checked every box.

DeMet’s selected a 17-acre parcel in the Airport Corporate Park to construct their 100,000-square-foot facility.  The location offered excellent transportation access, a strong regional labor pool, and critically, was part of New York State’s Empire Zone incentive program. This gave DeMet’s the competitive edge it needed to choose the Southern Tier over other states. To date, the project has created 250 new jobs for the region. This has been a meaningful boost for a community that, like many in upstate New York, had weathered its share of economic headwinds.

 While the iconic original Turtles clusters are primarily produced at DeMet’s facility in Scarborough, Ontario, the Big Flats plant soon became a hub for the company’s broader confectionery portfolio, including Flipz chocolate-covered pretzels and other snack products that DeMet’s brought under its umbrella after Brynwood Partners consolidated several candy brands.

 

CCHS Collection

It’s worth pausing to appreciate just how enduring the Turtles formula really is. It consists of only three ingredients: crunchy pecans, creamy caramel, and a chocolate shell. This formula has kept candy lovers coming back for more than 100 years.  Just a simple, honest combination that George DeMet figured out more than a century ago on a marble board in Chicago.

 Today, DeMet’s is owned by Yıldız Holding, the Turkish conglomerate that also owns Godiva, and the brand sells tens of millions of units annually. But the soul of the product remains the same — and part of that soul, for the better part of two decades now, has been rooted in the quiet, hardworking community of Big Flats, New York, a local sweet spot

 

Big Flats and the 1972 Flood

 by Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

1972 was going to be Big Flats’ year! It was the 150^th anniversary of the town’s founding and they had big plans. There were events scheduled throughout the year including a historic fashion show, town reunion, baking contest, art show, canoe race, antique show, and massive birthday party. The highlight of the whole thing was to be the Big Flats Diamond Jubilee three-day extravaganza from June 22^nd through the 24^th. The first night, Thursday the 22^nd, would start with an evening carnival at the Community Park. The next day would feature a firematics event, plus concerts and square dancing. Saturday was to be a massive parade featuring floats from every community organization in the town. Too bad Hurricane Agnes had to come and ruin everything.

Big Flats Jubilee button, 1972

 

The rain from Hurricane Agnes started late in the night on June 21^st and it just kept coming. By the 23^rd, the entire hamlet of Big Flats, plus large swaths of the more rural portions of the town along the Chemung River were under water. Nearly 3,000 residents were forced out of their homes into shelters at schools in neighboring Horseheads. To make matters, two ruptured oil tanks in the hamlet of Big Flats spilled a half-million gallons of gasoline into the flood waters. As the waters receded, crews from Sun Oil, Arco, and Gulf attempted to remove the fuel, but it wasn’t until June 28^th that the fire department declared that the threat of explosions had passed and allowed residents back in. Hundreds of homes were damaged. James A. Markell’s home on Olcott Road was entirely swept off it’s foundation. An additional five homes had to be razed by the town due to structural damage.  

Canal Street in the Hamlet of Big Flats, June 23, 1972

 Big Flats farmers were hit hard. Bill Smith, a State Senator with a dairy farm on Rt. 352, lost 18 of his 75 animals, plus 200 acres of corn, 20 tons of hay, and 10 tons of cow feed. The family had managed to move most of their furniture to the second floor Thursday night and had to be rescued by boat out of a third floor window Friday morning. All told, Chemung County farmers lost $3.5 million in crops and livestock. Thanks to that oil spill, some 4,016 acres of land in Big Flats, Southport, Ashland, and Chemung all showed signs of contamination, rendering them unusable for planting for years to come. Even without the spill, the flood washed away between 6 inches and, in some places near the river, three feet of once-fertile top soil, meaning even uncontaminated farms would struggle come spring. 

Smith farm in Big Flats from the air, June 23, 1972

Big Flats from the air, June 23, 1972

 The oil also polluted people’s drinking wells. In a recent interview with Big Flats resident Gloria Dick, she recalled that her family had been lucky enough to have a well fed by a spring which came down off a hill behind their house. As one of the few homes with safe drinking water, they kept their neighbors supplied. They weren’t the only ones helping. Teens from YES (Youth Emergency Services) under the auspices of Corning Glass Works cleaned flood mud from homes throughout Big Flats. 

As for Big Flats Diamond Jubilee? It was postponed until September, but folks still had a pretty good time. The real tragedy was the town’s planned history book, 150 Years: Big Flats, New York by Mrs. Samuel Farr. The first run of 2,000 copies had finished printing at 4pm on June 22^nd and was ready for sale at the Jubilee, only for the flood to destroy all but 700 copies. To make matters worse, the original manuscript, plus all the original photos, maps, and drawings used in the book were lost, meaning there could be no second edition. 

Town leaders had hoped to make 1972 a year to remember. It was. Just not the way they hoped.

Conscientious Objectors

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

 

On the morning of Monday, April 8, 1946, internees at the Conscientious Objector camp in Big Flats woke to find a flag reading “U.S. Slave Camp” on the flag pole in where the American flag normally flew. Weather conditions made it impossible to remove the flag until Wednesday. By that time, someone had put up boards baring the words “This Is a Slave Camp” with arrows pointing the way on trees leading to the camp entrance. These acts of protest did not go over well. The Corning American Legion wrote to Washington demanding a full investigation. The local papers were filled with angry letters and op-eds calling the conscientious objectors cowards and provocateurs just asking for trouble.

Lowering the flag, Elmira Star-Gazette, April 10, 1946

 The Conscientious Objector camp in Big Flats on Rt. 17 near Bottcher Gardens opened in August 1942 at an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp. During the four years of its operation, some 1,000 men served there, although never more than 200 at a time. They were housed in four large barracks and worked for the Soil Conservation Service on their 250-acre experimental grass and tree nursery. The saplings they grew were used all over the Northeast for reforestation projects. They also helped clear roads in the winter and bring in the harvest on area farms. Some also participated in voluntary medical and nutritional experiments for the U.S. military. Unlike with soldiers, the government did not pay the men or help care for their dependents, so many took outside, part-time work in Elmira as well.

The men who worked there came from all walks of life, united only by their opposition to war. They were religious objectors, mostly Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, mixed in with artistic types, and anti-tax political activists. Whatever their reasons for doing so, each had been called before their draft board and registered themselves as conscientious objectors. Each objector was required to select one of three church organizations to be affiliated with during their alternate service. The government had contracted with the Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, and the Quakers to run the conscientious objector camps. The one in Big Flats was managed by the Quakers.

There were problems at the camp almost immediately after opening. Within weeks, several of the men were complaining about the nursery manager’s hostile attitude. The Soil Conservation Service employees, meanwhile, complained about the underwhelming quality of the men’s work. On October 1, 1942, George Kingsley, Louis Krawczyk, and Stanley Murphy walked out of camp declaring that they could no longer perform such “insignificant work.” The three were subsequently convicted of desertion and sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison. 

Objectors harvesting hay, 1942

 Certain segments of the local community were not happy to have them. In March 1943, the Corning American Legion Post petitioned their congressman, Republican Sterling Cole, to investigate the camp. The Elmira Heights post seconded their call, claiming the objectors were “a stab in the back to our national security.”  After an inspection in August, Congressman Cole erroneously criticized the camp’s management for allowing the wives and girlfriends of the men to visit the camp. About one-third of the men had dependents, and many of whom found lodging in Elmira so they could see their spouses when they came into town between the end of their required workday and their 10:30pm curfew.

Despite the initial friction, the camp soon became part of the larger community. Area companies and farms actively recruited objectors for part-time work. The men’s families came to the area to settle and take work too. Several of the objectors volunteered as orderlies at the Arnot-Ogden Hospital, while others helped to renovate a local youth center. The camp basketball team played in the Elmira city league as “The Big Flats Friends” and music groups from the camp played at local venues. In June 1944, the camp hosted an Institute on International Relations, which drew hundreds of locals.

The war ended in August 1945 and the government began discharging conscientious objectors and closing camps soon after. By the spring of 1946, the Big Flats camp was the last one in New York and the men were getting restless. In addition to the slave camp protest signs, they also wrote to Governor Dewey, asking for his help. In May, 40 men went on strike and kept it up for weeks until all the men involved were discharged. Finally, the camp closed on October 31, 1946. Today, few traces of the camp remain and, with our all-volunteer military, there are even fewer opportunities to grapple with the question of how we treat those who refuse to fight.