Cereal bowls and time capsules: Calhoun County's two famous towns

Calhoun County changed what the world eats for breakfast. In Battle Creek, the Kellogg brothers’ sanitarium experiments with flaked grain birthed the modern cereal industry — by 1900 dozens of cereal companies crowded the city, and the survivors (Kellogg’s and Post) made “the Cereal City” the breakfast capital of the planet for a century. The legacy is everywhere: the world’s longest breakfast table at the annual Cereal Festival, Binder Park Zoo’s acclaimed African savanna, and the Fitzgerald-flavored lore of a company town that fed everyone.

Twelve miles east sits the county’s other marvel: Marshall, a town so perfectly preserved that its 850-building historic district ranks among the largest National Historic Landmark districts in the country. Victorian house museums, the fanciful Honolulu House, July’s famous home tour, and a fountain-circled downtown make it a pilgrimage for old-house lovers — and the home of Schuler’s, the century-old restaurant half of Michigan was taken to as a kid. Breakfast history on one end, architectural time capsule on the other: Calhoun packs a lot of America into one county.