Charles Elmer Hires was born on August 19, 1851 in Elsinboro, New Jersey, United States. He was the second son and sixth of ten children of John Dare and Mary (Williams) Hires. His ancestry was English, German, and Welsh; his father was a farmer.
After a little elementary schooling, young Hires worked for four years (1863-1867) in a drug store in Bridgeton, New Jersey. At one time and another he also attended night classes in a school of pharmacy and a medical college.
At sixteen Hires went to Philadelphia, arriving there with fifty cents in his pocket, but soon found employment with a physician-druggist. After a year there, he worked briefly in a wholesale drug house. Still restless, he returned to Bridgeton to go into partnership with two others in a drug store. Dissatisfied, however, with the outlook there, he presently sold his interest and returned to Philadelphia, where, on December 1, 1869, he opened his own pharmacy--on borrowed money--at the age of eighteen.
One day he noticed in a nearby excavation some peculiar-looking clay which he identified as fuller's earth, then frequently used for removing grease-spots from woolen clothing. He had a generous quantity of the clay dumped into the cellar under his store, where he and a helper cut it into round cakes, wrapped it, and sold it by the gross to wholesale drug houses for enough money to pay off the indebtedness on his business.
In the summer of 1875, while Hires and his wife were vacationing in New Jersey, the landlady of a boarding house where they stopped set before them a very tasty drink which she had compounded of sassafras bark and herbs. This gave Hires an idea, and when he returned to Philadelphia he experimented with sarsaparilla root and other ingredients and finally produced what he named Hires' Root Beer. He sold it from a booth at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. He also introduced it to drug-store soda fountains, though for years the beverage could also be brewed at home. At first packages of the dried roots, bark, and herbs were sold, and then three-ounce bottles of concentrated extract.
Hires took over a wholesale botanical drug business in 1877, but the root beer absorbed more and more of his time and attention, and in 1890 he incorporated the Charles E. Hires Company with a capital of $300, 000, which steadily expanded into millions. Hires was also a pioneer in the production of condensed milk. Beginning in Pennsylvania in 1896, during the following twenty years he organized half a dozen companies operating twenty-one condensed milk plants in the dairy regions of Vermont, New York, Michigan, and Canada. He sold the milk business to the Nestlé Company in 1918 but retained the presidency of the Charles E. Hires Company, the root beer concern.
Hires restored the old Quaker meeting house at Merion, Pennsylvania, and wrote a little book about it, A Short Historical Sketch of the Old Merion Meeting House (1917).
He died of an apoplectic stroke at his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He was buried in Westminster Cemetery, near Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Hires was a faithful member of the Society of Friends.
In 1875 Hires married Clara Kate Smith and by her had five children: Linda Smith, John Edgar, Harrison Streeter, Charles Elmer, and Clara Sheppard. His first wife died in 1910, and he married in the following year Emma Waln; there were no children by the second marriage.
