The cereal king's lake house became a war hospital, then a campus

Will Keith Kellogg picked the highest point over Gull Lake for his summer house, and in 1925 and 1926 he built it there — a grand brick Tudor-style place with a carriage house, a greenhouse, a boathouse, and even a Dutch windmill and a lakeside pagoda on the grounds. The cornflakes money paid for all of it. By then Kellogg, then in his sixties, was pouring his fortune into the land around Gull Lake: he’d already started financing a bird sanctuary on Wintergreen Lake in 1926 and 1927, and in 1928 he handed his farm to what was then Michigan State College, with the cheerfully specific condition that he and his family keep getting free milk and eggs.

The Manor House had a stranger second act. When the country went to war, Kellogg gave the house to the military. In 1942 the U.S. Coast Guard used it as an induction site for new servicemen, and later it became a branch of the Battle Creek-based Percy Jones Army Hospital, where wounded soldiers came to recover by the lake that a cereal magnate had landscaped for leisure.

After the war the estate found its lasting purpose. In 1952 Kellogg gave the property, Manor House and all, to Michigan State University. Today it anchors the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station — thousands of acres of farm, forest, and lakeshore where MSU scientists run long-term field studies, and the house itself serves as a conference center, restored in 2000 to the look it had when Kellogg watched the sun set over Gull Lake from his own front lawn.

You can still walk the gardens. The windmill still turns. It’s a working research station now, but it wears its origin as a rich man’s lake retreat without much disguise.