People · 2026-08-26

W. Hoover Brown and Ava King Brown

Planted 100 acres of popcorn on the family's Wyandot County, Ohio, farm in early May 1936, with Ava's encouragement and with farm income depressed, and went into popcorn processing, the start of Wyandot Popcorn.
Founded Popped-Right Corn Company in 1948 as a subsidiary, selling ready-to-eat bags of popcorn to movie theaters.
Added caramel corn around 1950 using a recipe from Bert Shirk of Shirk's Candy, a product Ava Brown named Golden Crisp Caramel Corn.

May 1936, a hundred acres

The founding sentence belongs to Hoover, in his own words, as MarionMade printed them. "With our farm income depressed, and with Ava's encouragement, I decided to go into the popcorn processing business. We thought this would bolster our income and, at the same time, allow me to continue to operate the family farm. In early May 1936, I planted 100 acres of popcorn."

The year holds across the company story page, MarionMade, the Marion County Historical Society, their son George's memorial, travel coverage, and the 2023 Astara Capital release. May and the acreage come from that first-person quote.

The place scatters a little, and the scatter is easy to reconcile. Wikipedia puts the founding in Wyandot County. Later snack industry pages give the headquarters as Marion. A Columbus Dispatch account from 2014 has the firm founded in southern Wyandot County in 1936 and moved to Marion in the 1940s. George's memorial is specific about the first building, "the one room school house, the West Macedonia School, where his father, Hoover, and George's aunts had once attended." First acres in Wyandot County, later town Marion.

What 1936 describes is a Depression diversifier rather than a factory. Grain and livestock were not paying. Popcorn was an inexpensive treat, and MarionMade says the business "grew steadily during the depression years, as popcorn became a favorite inexpensive treat," which is civic tradition rather than an audited ledger. The industrial fact underneath is the decision to process. A farmer who plants a hundred acres of popping corn and runs it through his own mill has kept the grade inside the house that grew it, the same structural move Ira E. Weaver had made in Indiana eight years earlier.

Ava King, a shovel town, and an encouragement

Ava is the reason this entry carries two names.

Her parents, on the cemetery file, are George Washington King and Sarah. The Dave and Anne Brown Family Fund at the Marion Community Foundation says the same and adds the local context: George W. King was a founder of the Marion Power Shovel, and he and Sarah built Etowah. The shovel works started in August 1884 as the Marion Steam Shovel Company, founded by Henry Barnhart, Edward Huber, and George W. King. George King Brown's memorial has him raised at Etowah, called the Beautiful Place and also King's Mansion, a house that later became the home of Central Christian Church.

Encouragement is the verb the company still prints, and it is Hoover's own. The story page names both founders. Alicia Sexton, then senior manager of sales, gave Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery the same two-founder line in February 2022.

Ava turns up again as the business added products. Around 1950 Popped-Right wanted a caramel line, and Hoover went to Bert Shirk of Shirk's Candy. MarionMade: "Bert's knowledge and unique recipe were instrumental in creating a wonderful new product, which Ava Brown named Golden Crisp Caramel Corn." Ohio Traveler loosens the naming to "Golden Crisp and Caramel Corn," and both versions belong in the file. The recipe is Shirk's. The name on the bag is hers.

A cemetery file, not a childhood

Find a Grave memorial 170088809 names William Hoover Brown, born 23 May 1894, dead 1 May 1979 at 84, buried at Marion Cemetery in Phillips Section 44, Lot 1. The same lot holds memorial 170088757, Ava Maria King Brown, born 19 April 1899, dead 16 December 1972 at 73. Michael Brewer created both on 17 September 2016, and neither carries biography text. No Marion Star obituary or Ohio death certificate turned up to confirm the days independently.

The identification is solid. The same cemetery file lists George King Brown, 1925 to 2010, David Hoover Brown, and Donald Warren Brown as sons. George's memorial, created in 2010 from an obituary, names "the late W. Hoover and Ava (King) Brown" as his parents and has him watching them found Wyandot Popcorn in 1936. MarionMade and the company story page use the same pairing.

The names refuse to settle. The memorials read William Hoover and Ava Maria. The privately printed 1979 memoir, quoted on Genealogy.com, is titled Our Lives in Review with Ava Marie. Company pages use Hoover and Ava. Ohio Magazine collapses the founder with his snack-side son and prints "Warren Hoover Brown," which is a magazine error. This entry uses W. Hoover Brown and Ava King Brown and prints Maria against Marie as memorial against memoir.

The memoir also gives a birth on the farm of Abraham Lincoln and Myrtle Welsh Brown, two miles southwest of Wyandot in Antrim Township, on a day that matches the stone. That is a birthplace, and no retrieved source builds a childhood on it.

Theater bags in 1948

The ready-to-eat door opens in 1948 in the pages that date it. Road Trips of America says Hoover founded the subsidiary Popped-Right Corn Company that year and began selling ready-to-eat bags to movie theaters. Ohio Traveler uses the same year and the same purpose. Wikipedia uses 1948.

The company's own story page refuses to print a month or a year, saying only that "over a decade later, the Brown family formed a subsidiary company, Popped Right," and Sexton's 2022 quotation repeats the hedge. Use 1948 and note that the house itself will not date it.

The theater trade was already built by then. Charles T. Manley had been selling electric lobby cabinets out of Kansas City since 1925, and by 1945 more than half the popcorn eaten in the United States was eaten in theaters, a shift traced in The second box office. What the Browns added was a Marion bag sold to chains that already wanted the smell, popped and packaged upstream instead of in the lobby.

Two sons, two sides of the house

The work split along the family. George came home from Purdue in 1950, joined as a salesman, and, in his memorial's phrase, "traveled the world to further their sale of popcorn." Warren joined in the early 1960s and ran the snack division, Popped Right. MarionMade lists three sons, George, Warren, and David, along with grandsons Brooks and Doug, as executives and board members. David's public memory runs to a farm, Maken Bacon near Morral, and a community foundation fund.

Scale as a claim

By the 1980s the civic and travel pages want a crown, and they hand over several. Road Trips of America says that "by the 1980s, Wyandot Popcorn Company was the second-largest producer of popcorn in the United States and accounted for nearly 25% of the worldwide trade of raw popcorn." MarionMade, without a decade stamp, says that "at one time, Wyandot was the world's leading exporter of popcorn, shipping to 75 countries and accounting for nearly one quarter of the total global sales of popcorn." Wikipedia adds a poundage of 50 million pounds, citing an Andrew F. Smith encyclopedia page this entry did not open. A recent automation feature repeats the 25 percent line with no date attached.

Print the scatter and stop there. Second largest in the 1980s is a travel page sentence. The quarter of global sales and the 75 countries are undated civic copy. The 50 million pounds rests on a book page nobody here has read. What survives the arithmetic is that an Ohio farm mill, with George on the raw side and Warren on the snack side, grew into a raw-popcorn house big enough that later writers argue about its share.

1989 will not sit still

The pages disagree about what happened at the end of the raw-popcorn business.

The company story page says that "in 1989, the two companies merged to become Wyandot, Inc.," and Sexton repeated that in 2022. George's 2010 memorial has Warren's snack division "later merged with Wyandot Popcorn to form Wyandot, Inc." and gives no year. Wikipedia dates a consolidation to 1981, puts a snack plant at Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 1981, and has the raw-popcorn operation sold in 1989 to Vogel Popcorn, "who subsequently sold the business to ConAgra Foods." The Dispatch account has Wyandot selling its raw-popcorn-processing operation in 1989, about the time ConAgra came to town, and never names Vogel.

One document complicates the Vogel step. A federal bulk popcorn antitrust complaint dated 15 August 1989 lists Wyandot as a bulk processor through 1988 and states that Golden Valley Microwave Foods acquired Vogel on or about 14 October 1987. A 1989 sale to Vogel would have been a sale to a house Golden Valley already owned, which makes Wikipedia's chain shorter than it looks. The merger and the sale both stay on the page, unreconciled, because the sources are.

What followed is the present tense of the plant rather than the founders' story. Fire took the Marion plant in 1996, and MarionMade says the company kept more than 300 teammates on the payroll at 60 percent of wages through an eight-month recovery. The Marion Star reported on 8 November 2015 that chairman Douglas W. Brown had appointed Rob Sarlls president and chief executive effective 2 November. Astara Capital Partners announced a majority investment on 18 January 2023, naming Dewey Armstrong as chief executive continuing to lead the company, after trade coverage in 2022 had named Paul Hritz interim chief executive and a later feature named Jaap Langenberg. The business today is a contract manufacturer of extruded snacks, tortilla chips, and ready-to-eat popcorn.

The museum as public memory

George built the family's other legacy out of machines. MarionMade credits him with creating the Wyandot Popcorn Museum in the mid-1970s, "collecting and restoring the world's largest assortment of popcorn antiques." The Marion Star dates the public openings: September 1982 at 135 Wyandot Avenue, Southland Mall in 1985, and Heritage Hall in 1989. Road Trips of America says he helped buy the 1910 post office that became Heritage Hall in exchange for the south annex. The collection's own first treasure is a Cretors No. 1 cart of 1899, acquired in the spring of 1981.

Paul Newman arrives late and as a customer, not a founder. Ohio Traveler puts a handshake at Mid-Ohio Raceway and a Central Park launch in 1984, and George later bought a Dunbar wagon Newman had used for promotion, dated 1911 by Road Trips and given as a 1909 Model 950 by Ohio Magazine. Those machines sit under a circus tent inside the old post office.

George was born on 11 July 1925 in Marion and died on 22 January 2010 at Marion General Hospital at 84. He had retired from daily work in December 1992 and left the board in 1996. His parents lie in Marion Cemetery, Phillips Section 44, Lot 1, Hoover under the dates 1894 to 1979 and Ava under 1899 to 1972.