Battle Creek, the Cereal City

Battle Creek is “the Cereal City,” and the nickname is earned: the breakfast-cereal industry was born right here. It started at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a famous health resort run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, where patients ate a strict vegetarian diet. In the mid-1890s, Dr. Kellogg and his younger brother, W.K. Kellogg, were experimenting with wheat and accidentally invented the breakfast flake.

W.K. saw what his brother didn’t — that ordinary people would buy these flakes by the box — and in 1906 he founded the company that became Kellogg’s. A former Sanitarium patient named C.W. Post had the same idea and built Post Cereals just up the road. Their rivalry, and the dozens of imitators it spawned, turned Battle Creek into the “Cereal Capital of the World.”

The cereal story is still everywhere in town: the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the country’s largest charitable foundations, is headquartered downtown, and every summer the city sets out the “World’s Longest Breakfast Table” for its cereal festival. The Battle Creek history museum and the historic Adventist village fill in the rest.