Gigantic Roll of Life Savers - Gouverneur, NY - Ginormous Everyday Objects on Waymarking.com

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Edward John Noble (1882 – 1958) was an American broadcasting and candy industrialist born in Gouverneur, New York and educated in the public schools. He co-founded the Life Savers Corporation in 1913, and founded the American Broadcasting Company when he purchased the NBC Blue Network in 1943 following the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) decree that RCA divest itself of one of its two radio networks.

This sculpture is one of 6 which originally adorned the lawn of the Life Savers Building in Port Chester, NY about 350 miles SE of here. Gouverneur received one of the six giant Life Savers® rolls - the Pep-O-Mint - and the Rotary Club erected it at the Gouverneur Village Green on Nov 10, 1987. The sculpture has a link dedicated to it at the Gouverneur Chamber of Commerce Web site.

I could not find information on when the roll lost it's original Pep-O-Mint coloring but I found a reference indicating it has been this color since at least 2005.

Life Savers candy was first created in 1912 by Clarence Arthur Crane, a Garrettsville, Ohio candy maker and father of the famed poet Hart Crane. Crane was looking for a new "summer candy" to supplement his chocolate business, which slumped in hot weather.

Crane developed a line of hard mints but did not have the space or machinery to make them. He contracted with a pill manufacturer to press the mints into shape. The pill manufacturer, whose machinery was malfunctioning, found that the pressing process worked much better when the mints were stamped with a hole in the middle.

Crane called the new candy "Crane's Peppermint Life Savers", because they looked like miniature throwable life preservers. The ring-shaped devices were just beginning to come into use after the Titanic disaster.

In 1913, Crane sold the formula for his Life Savers candy to Edward Noble for only $2,900. Noble started his own candy company and began producing and selling the mints known as Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. He also began to package the mints into rolls wrapped in tinfoil to prevent them from going stale. This process was done by hand until 1919 when machinery was developed by Edward Noble's brother, Robert Peckham Noble, to streamline the process.

Robert Peckham Noble, Edward Noble's brother and a Purdue educated engineer, took his younger brother's entrepreneurial vision and designed and built the manufacturing facilities needed to expand the company. The Lifesavers primary manufacturing plant was located in Port Chester, New York. Robert P. Noble led the company as its Chief Executive Officer and primary shareholder for more than 40 years, until selling the company in the late 1950s.

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