The Kelloggs Read online

  The children of Ann Janette and John Preston Kellogg. Left to right: Preston Stanley (age 8), Emma (16), Will Keith (6), Clara Belle (seated, 3), John Harvey (standing behind Clara Belle, 14), and Laura (21). The photograph was taken in 1866, just before the birth of Hester Ann. Credit 11

  On the farm, Ann Janette encouraged her husband to raise sheep to produce a steady supply of wool yarn for the family as well as to sell and pay off John Preston’s bad bank debts. Mr. Kellogg promptly purchased fifty sheep from a dealer in the East. The flock multiplied even faster than his family. He scrounged together the money to buy Ann Janette a new spinning wheel and loom so she could weave and make clothing for the growing Kellogg clan during four very different climates. Within months of the animals’ arrival, Ann Janette was making yards of wool cloth. Using butternut bark to dye some of the wool brown, and yellow oak bark to dye the rest yellow, she fashioned smart suits for her husband and sons and dresses and petticoats for her and her daughters. Crafting each outfit with a minimum of waste, Ann Janette made sure to have enough wool left over to sell.4

  In 1842, a neighbor’s son approached Mr. Kellogg with a proposition. The son had established a profitable 160-acre farm twenty-two miles away in the settlement of Tyrone, a village consisting of a small gristmill, a general store, a blacksmith, a schoolhouse, and eight families. Another twenty-five farming families lived within a six-mile radius. The Tyrone farm boasted a large frame house with a living room, parlor, two bedrooms, and an enormous brick fireplace that could be used for both cooking and warmth. There was also an attached stable for six cows, an open pasture for livestock, and a deep well for drawing water.5 The neighbor’s son was willing to trade down, farm for farm, because his parents’ spread was adjacent to John Preston Kellogg’s homestead. The Kelloggs eagerly accepted the deal and looked forward to a fresh start and a much better home and farm.6

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  THE VILLAGE OF Tyrone proved hospitable and devout. Eager to establish a permanent place of worship, the families living there invited the Kelloggs to become charter members of the Hartland Center Congregational Church. Given John Preston’s and Ann Janette’s propensity to work hard and pray harder, this was a request they accepted with alacrity. A deep Christian faith played a fundamental role in the lives of the entire Kellogg family. Every Sunday, during his first few years in Michigan, John Preston traveled two miles south to Flint for a Baptist church service. On one Sunday, he underwent a public baptism and was immersed in the Flint River. Mr. Kellogg also built a family altar where he and Mary Ann, and after her death Ann Janette, led the children in daily Bible readings and morning and evening prayers. After the family moved to Tyrone, the children attended Hartland’s Sabbath school every Sunday, following a formal church service.

  The principles of honesty, kindness toward one’s fellows, hard work, and forgiving the trespasses of others were demonstrated by example rather than preached or otherwise drilled into the children’s heads. Occasionally flawed by a streak of stubbornness, a character trait both John and Will inherited, Mr. Kellogg maintained a peaceful, austere, and, above all, God-fearing home. As his eldest son, Merritt, later recalled:

  The first 20 years of my life was spent under my father’s roof, and during all those years, I never heard of his telling an obscene or vulgar story, or using unbecoming language. I never saw him angry, I never knew him to call any of us children reproachful names….I never heard [Ann Janette] complain of a hard lot, a hard row to hoe, or of being tired, or sick, of the job that she had undertaken, nor did I ever see her manifest anger or impatience toward one of the children or to father.7

  More earthly, Ann Janette told John Preston about an article she had read in the Farmer’s Almanac extolling the agricultural advantages of growing red clover, instead of the more popular and common “redtop,” or timothy grass. Red clover had the double benefit of serving as an excellent source of hay for feeding the sheep, horses, and other livestock as well as significantly improving the fertility of the soil. This dual use made red clover seeds extremely valuable. On the vanguard of a farming trend, the Kelloggs found a third source of income: selling red clover seeds they harvested from their crops to other farmers.

  By the following spring, Mr. Kellogg was raising apples and peaches, currants, and vegetables, in addition to the red clover. His sheep were so prized that he sold each animal for $5 (or $150 in 2016), a healthy increase from what he paid, $1.50 (about $45 in 2016). With the daily churning of butter from the farm’s two milk cows, eggs provided by a brood of chickens, and the soap and candles Ann made from the tallow of their slaughtered livestock, she expanded the household accounts in ways that once seemed unreachable.8 Each successive season, John Preston became more adept at managing the soil and livestock so that his farm produced multiple harvests each year: clover seed and hay in the winter, wool and mutton in July, wheat during the months of August through October, and fattened pigs for slaughter in November and December.

  Within a few years, Mr. Kellogg operated the most profitable farm in the county. He paid off his banking debts, added a spacious kitchen and woodshed to their farmhouse, and purchased both a two-seater wagon for the spring and a double bobsled replete with sleigh bells for winter riding. John Preston and Ann Janette shared their success by giving a nearby widow a spinning wheel so that she might generate some income and forgiving a debt of $250 (about $8,250 in 2016) from Warner Lake, the former partner, who was still insolvent after the Genesee bank investment fiasco.9

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  WHEN JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG was born on February 26, 1852, the family still lived in Tyrone. Like many Americans in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the Kelloggs actively participated in what became known as the Second Great Awakening, a period when many preachers took to traveling from town to town in New England, New York, and westward, announcing that they were “God’s chosen people in the redemption of the world.”10 The most popular evangelists held rousing, emotional revival meetings, spread the Gospel, and promised that the Second Coming of their Lord, Jesus Christ, was imminent.

  A key actor in this movement was a Baptist preacher named William Miller. Based on his study of the Holy Scriptures, especially the books of Daniel and Revelation, Reverend Miller predicted a simultaneously apocalyptic and miraculous happening, the Second Advent, sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. After that prediction failed to occur, Reverend Miller retreated to recalibrate his biblical timeline. In August of 1844, at a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, a preacher named Samuel Snow announced that from studying the Jewish calendar his calculations pointed to October 22, 1844, which coincided with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.11 A wide swath of the denizens of upstate New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts awaited something that never happened. The earth continued to rotate on its axis and revolve around the sun. The inhabitants of the “Burnt-over District” returned, as Henry Thoreau famously wrote a decade later, to living “lives of quiet desperation.”12

  Reverend Miller’s incorrect predictions came to be known as the “Great Disappointment.” A large number of his followers, the so-called Millerites, abandoned the cause as they struggled to reclaim the earthly possessions they had given away in preparation for ascending to heaven. That said, this movement did attract many others who continued to believe that a utopian life was possible if one bound his or her actions and thoughts with the teachings of Christ. Moreover, these devout followers fervently believed in the imminence of the Second Coming even as they debated over when that might occur.

  In 1831, William Miller began preaching in Vermont on the Second Coming of Christ, which by 1844 came to be known as the “Great Disappointment.” Credit 12

  The religious group that came to play the major role in the Kelloggs’ lives was led by Ellen Harmon, a former Millerite, and her soon-to-be husband, a Sabbatarian Baptist minister, James White. Although the Whites avoided setting a specific date, they preached that an apocalyptic end of t
he world was fast-approaching and, when it did come to pass, only the most devout Christians would ascend to heaven. Like many of their neighbors, the Kelloggs prayed that the Advent would remake a deeply flawed society into one that mirrored heaven; that the lives of wayward Americans would be transformed and saved; and the nation would rid itself of the social evils of poverty, drunkenness, unequal access to education, ill treatment of women, and, that most peculiar of institutions, slavery.13

  In the summer of 1852, a neighbor named Merritt E. Cornell impressed John Preston with his interpretation of the new religious movement unfolding in upstate New York, led by Harmon and White, and spreading its faith westward. Growing increasingly dissatisfied with the mode of Christianity he had been practicing in Tyrone, John Preston joined Cornell for a series of prayer meetings in nearby Jackson. Before the meetings ended, the patriarch fell under the influence of Joseph Bates, a charismatic preacher and former sea captain traveling through Michigan with the goal of recruiting others to join a new denomination that became known as Seventh-day Adventism. The first portion of the denomination’s name was because its followers celebrated the Sabbath on Saturdays, as the ancient Hebrews did in the Old Testament. After several more prayer meetings, the Kellogg family sold their farm and followed an Adventist congregation just beginning to sprout and praise Jesus in Jackson. There, John Preston opened his first broom factory alongside a store to sell his wares. It was a trade he imported from his hometown of Hadley, Massachusetts, where the broomcorn manufacturing industry began in 1798.14

  In 1854, the Whites and many of their Adventist followers decided to leave New York and base their operations in Battle Creek. Two years later, in 1856, Mr. Kellogg moved his family to Battle Creek as well—and there they stayed.15 A full and financially supportive member of his church, Mr. Kellogg raised or contributed critical capital beginning in 1854 when he donated $200 (about $5,820 in 2016) to purchase the first of many large tents the Adventist clergy used for holding outdoor prayer meetings.16 In the winter of 1855–1856, he and three other donors contributed $1,200 (about $33,900 in 2016) to relocate the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s publishing arm, the Review and Herald Company, from Rochester, New York, to Battle Creek.17 In addition to a biweekly newspaper, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, the firm published Bible tracts, church doctrines, sermons, magazines, newsletters, health reform magazines, and other materials sold by subscription to the growing congregation of Seventh-day Adventists across the nation. In the infancy of mass printed media, these publications allowed for communication with the denomination’s far-flung followers. They were essential to its growth and sense of community. More pragmatically, the subscriptions and book fees generated revenue for the Church.

  Ellen and James White, and others, leading a Seventh-day Adventist camp meeting in Eagle Lake, Minnesota, circa 1875 Credit 13

  Once established in Battle Creek, John Preston added political and civic activities to his religious obligations. Initially a Whig, John Preston disapproved of William Henry Harrison’s somewhat alcoholic “Log cabins and hard cider” presidential campaign. An early supporter of the abolitionist cause, John Preston was almost certainly in attendance at one of the earliest mass meetings of the Republican Party, a gathering of more than ten thousand voters near Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854.

  According to family accounts, John Preston and Ann Janette’s opposition to slavery led them to become “station agents” on the “Michigan Central Line” of the Underground Railroad. In the years before the Civil War, the Kelloggs facilitated the passage of several runaway slaves as they escaped through Michigan to Canada and freedom. They, like all the underground conductors, took considerable risk especially after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which carried a penalty of six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine (about $31,300 in 2016), for helping runaway slaves.18 Many brave Michiganders thumbed their proverbial noses at the federal statute.19 One Battle Creek conductor, Charles E. Barnes, described the station as one “conducted with the greatest secrecy…the work was done gratuitously and without price. It was all out of sympathy for the escaped slaves and from principle. We were working for humanity.”20 Others insist that Battle Creek’s Underground Railroad, while wonderfully humanitarian, was a poorly kept secret: “the sentiments of the inhabitants were such that slaves could have been escorted through the town to the accompaniment of a brass band and a hallelujah chorus without fear of arrest.”21

  Ann Janette Kellogg (age 46) and John Preston Kellogg (age 63), circa 1870 Credit 14

  Nevertheless, Ann Janette’s and John Preston’s brave acts of charity made lasting impressions on their children. Late in his life, Merritt recalled how impressed he was by the kindness and sympathy his parents offered to the fugitives they aided and how they “took as much pains” to help these runaways as they did for “white folks.” To come full circle, years later in 1883, one of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s patients was Sojourner Truth. She moved to Battle Creek in 1860, the same year Will was born. At the end of her life, the abolitionist, author, women’s rights activist, and former slave developed skin ulcers on her legs that would not heal despite heroic medical efforts by Dr. Kellogg, including, as he claimed in 1932, a skin graft using his own skin, which produced “a ring of white skin around the colored woman’s limb.”22 Weakened by infection and relentless pain, she died in Battle Creek at the age of eighty-six on November 26, 1883. At the time, her funeral was reported to be the largest ever held in the town.23

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  COMPARED TO THE OTHER strapping Kellogg children, John was the “runt of the litter.” His parents worried that the little boy was so sickly he would never reach adulthood. Given the family’s medical history, Ann Janette developed a fierce overprotectiveness for the child. She constantly contrived ways to keep John indoors, safely away from the roughhousing of the other boys in town. John Preston, on the other hand, distanced himself from his son and had little faith in John’s survival. Before he died of consumption in 1881 at the age of seventy-three, Mr. Kellogg pleaded with Ellen White to look after his twenty-nine-year-old son. Twenty-seven years later, while speaking to a group of San volunteers on September 2, 1908, John discussed his father’s parting words: “He said to me, ‘John, if I had known you were going to amount to anything, I would have taken more pains with you.’ ”24

  John Preston and Ann Janette had several other tangible reasons to be concerned about their son’s survival beyond the fact that he was small for his age. While still a child, John contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, then one of the most common causes of death for children and young adults in the United States. John’s body managed to immunologically sequester his lung infection, which he most likely contracted from his father, who, most likely, contracted it from his first wife, Mary Ann. The future doctor continued to have serious lung problems, intermittently, for the remainder of his life, including life-threatening relapses of tuberculosis during his adolescence and again from 1918 to 1919. In 1935, John told H. C. Sherman, the distinguished nutritional chemist at Columbia University, “I lost my left lung before I was 20 years of age from tuberculosis. There is no motion in my left side when breathing. This has been something of a handicap to me, but I have managed to carry on and am still at work.”25

  Young John also suffered from several gastrointestinal disorders, which were only exacerbated by a steady diet of fried meats, overcooked grains and potatoes simmering in fatty gravy, and a youthful predilection for the sugary treats distributed by his mother at the completion of a day’s chores. At age twelve, John developed a bloody colitis severe enough to scar his colon with adhesions. This condition led to frequent bouts of constipation and he eventually developed hemorrhoids from straining so much at stool. Before John was fifteen, he experienced one of the most painful, chronic maladies known to man, an anal fissure, which is, literally, a tear in that highly sensitive spot. After incurring this injury, the mere passage of a bowel movement felt like barbed wire scraping agains
t his rectum and anus. The rest of the day (and night), his nether region either throbbed with pain or burned like fire. And because the fragile tissue of the rectum is so poorly supplied with blood, his fissure took months to heal but would easily reopen upon the next bout of constipation or evacuation of a hard stool, only to begin the cycle of bleeding, barbed-wire-like pain, and nonstop burning, itching, and throbbing all over again. It hardly takes a degree in psychology to suggest these chronic conditions contributed to his subsequent obsession with “colon hygiene,” the consumption of bowel-friendly foods, and his advocacy (and practice) of the frequent evacuation of soft, unthreatening bowel movements.

  As a child, John exhibited many of the character traits that would mark his entire life. To begin, he loved the spotlight and he quickly learned how to play the violin, organ, and piano, which helped make him a popular guest at events and gatherings.26 He also demonstrated a deeply held sense of responsibility, righteousness, and a genuine ambition to do good for others. The boy’s tenacity was far greater than his small frame or physical health suggested and others underestimated his resolve at their peril. At age four, John asked if he could accompany his father and half-brother Merritt on an errand. Skeptical of the boy’s stamina and unwilling to be slowed down on what was certain to be a long jaunt, Mr. Kellogg agreed on the condition John keep up with their pace. During the journey, the toddler tripped and fell headlong into a patch of mud. Before his older brother and father could turn around and extricate him from the potentially embarrassing tumble, the little boy lifted himself up from the muck. Cleaning himself off, John beamed a big smile and exclaimed, “I did that on purpose!”