An early advertisement for Grape-Nuts (Post Consumer Brands)
Springfield native Charles W. Post created the breakfast cereal industry and made a fortune. He was charismatic and innovative. He also suffered from lifelong illnesses, physical and mental, that both contributed to his success and eventually drove him to suicide.
Post’s daughter, Marjorie Merriweather Post (who was born in Springfield, but lived here only as an infant), inherited her father’s business genius and multiplied the value of the company he founded. As a result, for much of her lifetime, Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) was America’s wealthiest woman. (She also built Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate that now belongs to Donald Trump.)
C.W. Post – he was always known by his initials – attempted a career as an inventor and industrialist in Springfield. It turned out, however, that he was better salesman and promoter than engineer.
C.W. Post, undated (Wikipedia)
Post (1854-1914) was born in Springfield, the son of Charles Rollins and Caroline Lathrop Post (their house on Black Avenue later became the Carrie Post King’s Daughters Home). Charles Rollins Post was a dealer in farm implements.
C.W. attended Springfield public schools and studied briefly at the Illinois Industrial Institute, predecessor of the University of Illinois. At age 20, he married Ella Merriweather in Pawnee.
Newspaper mentions in the 1870s report C.W. was an expert marksman and one of the founders of the Springfield Rifle Club. As a young man, he was the Springfield sales agent for a Chicago firm that sold “Remington’s celebrated breech-loading rifles,” along with sewing machines and farm implements. He also briefly operated a general store in Independence, Kansas.
Returning to Springfield, he began working on inventions, designing several pieces of farm machinery and a hodge-podge of non-agricultural products, among them “scientific suspenders,” a player piano roll and a wheel for a modern-style safety bicycle.
Post and two partners, real estate investor Louis Coleman (1842-1914) and W.F. Reed, founded the Illinois Agricultural Works in 1881 to manufacture “plows, cultivators, harrows,” etc. of Post’s design.
IAG built a 28,000-square-foot factory at 10th Street and South Grand Avenue. The company, however, lasted only a couple of years. C.W. pinned the failure on, quote, “a scheming banker who tried to take control of the fast-growing business,” apparently meaning Coleman. For his part, Coleman seemingly blamed Post, saying it was “the impracticability of the supposedly practical man” that led to IAG’s collapse.
Whoever was at fault, Post couldn’t handle the quarrel and the lawsuits that resulted, and he suffered the first of what eventually would be seven nervous breakdowns.
After their marriage, Ella and C.W. had moved in with his parents; Marjorie was born in the home on Black Avenue in March 1887. About six months later, however, C.W. Post moved the family to Fort Worth, Texas. There, Post tried to develop an 81-acre subdivision, but the stress of that project led to another breakdown.
Post suffered greatly from stomach and digestive problems, which exacerbated his mental and emotional issues. In search of a cure, he eventually became a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a Seventh Day Adventist-connected health complex in Battle Creek, Mich. The sanitarium, run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, served its patients a “natural-foods” vegetarian menu. That menu included corn flakes, made via a process invented by Dr. Kellogg and his brother Will. (The sanitarium’s regimen also included hot tub baths, exercise, and inspirational talks; among other unconventional beliefs, John Harvey Kellogg thought eating spicy foods led to sexual arousal and masturbation.)
Although his stint at the sanitarium apparently didn’t cure Post’s intestinal problems, he was attracted by the marketing potential of some of Kellogg’s food products. According to encyclopedia.com:
Post left the sanitarium after a few months and briefly attempted to operate a competing clinic, La Vita Inn, in Battle Creek. During this time he published a book, “I Am Well!” which promoted “mind-cure, ” a belief then fashionable among some American businessmen and intellectuals who denied illness as artificial and proclaimed the human mind capable of overcoming all physical disorders. La Vita Inn never attained significant success.
Early in 1895 Post began the manufacture of Postum, a grain product intended as a coffee substitute, similar to one of Kellogg’s concoctions. The manufacture of Grape-Nuts, based on another Kellogg item, began the following year. Post named his new company Postum Ltd., after his original product. Postum Ltd. achieved wide-scale distribution of its products through massive spending on advertising in newspapers and magazines. Post viewed advertising as the most significant component of his business, stating that he didn’t care who managed production or sales, as long as he wrote the advertising. His advertisements appealed to the health concerns of the American public, telling consumers that his products would put them on the “road to Wellville” and claiming that his breakfast items made red blood.
By the early 1900s, Postum products were available nationwide and Post had become one of the top five advertisers in the country, spending over $1 million annually.
Postum advertisement, 1910 (Wikipedia)
C.W. followed up Postum with Grape-Nuts breakfast cereal, introduced in 1897, and with his own version of corn flakes, Post Toasties, which went to market in 1904. The recipes for Postum, Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties were all close to those for products the Kelloggs pioneered. Post may not have stolen recipes, as some people suspect, but he certainly took advantage of concepts that originated with the Kellogg brothers.
The difference is that the Kelloggs focused their attention on the sanitarium, while C.W. took the cereal business seriously. As a result, it’s fair to say that C.W. Post deserves credit for creating the cereal business as we know it today.
Advertising indeed was the key to C.W.’s success. He advertised Postum, Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties all over the U.S., and within 10 years of its incorporation, the Postum Cereal Company was worth $10 million, an enormous amount at the turn of the 20th century.
No one knows exactly how C.W. came up with the name for “Grape-Nuts,” his most enduring creation. The cereal contains no grapes or nuts, just flour, salt, yeast and in the modern version some added vitamins and minerals. But Post marketed Grape-Nuts as “a natural food for brain and nerve centers,” and in that, he might have been onto something. From a 2021 Consumer Reports article:
The cereal is an excellent source of whole grains with 7 grams of fiber—about 25 percent of your daily need – per half-cup. Most of the fiber is insoluble, which is the type that’s key for preventing constipation. Plus you get 6 grams of protein (about the same amount as in a large egg), and the cereal has no added sugars.
However, Consumer Reports also notes that a half-cup serving of Grape-Nuts gives a person 200 calories and 280 milligrams of sodium – and very few people stick to only a half-cup. “Chances are, you’re pouring a lot more into your bowl,” a CR nutritionist was quoted in the review, “so you should realize that means you’re taking in more calories and sodium along with the good stuff.”
C.W. also stretched the truth a little about the benefits of Grape-Nuts. After a 1907 Collier’s Weekly expose, for instance, the Post company stopped claiming that Grape-Nuts could cure appendicitis.
But Grape-Nuts is lightweight and nutritious, and it resists spoilage, so it was part of the menu for explorers like Admiral Richard Byrd in Antarctica in the 1930s and Sir Edmund Hillary when he accomplished the first ascent of Mount Everest in the 1950s. During World War II, Grape-Nuts was part of the lightweight jungle ration used by many U.S. and Allied Forces.
In the early 1900s, Post took some of his cereal riches back to Texas, where he bought 225,000 acres of land and laid out an entire city, which he envisioned as a model Utopian community. He named it Post City. He built a hotel, a cotton gin and a textile mill, and dozens of houses and planted trees along every street. Alcohol sales were prohibited.
C.W also promoted new farming methods and new crops in the area. He even experimented with rainmaking. After reading that storms often accompanied artillery fire during wars, C.W. theorized that midair explosions would create vertical air currents that in turn would condense vapor in the atmosphere. Texas Monthly magazine described the results in a 1989 article:
(Post) decided to blast rain out of the West Texas sky – to fly kites equipped with two-pound charges of dynamite and five-minute fuses. But no kite fliers stepped forward; instead for two years men lit fuses on the Caprock rim. Post said he went seven for thirteen in his 1912 “rain battles,” but since he scheduled many of them in the spring storm season, those statistics are inconclusive. Following the explosions of April 27, 1912, two hailstorms promptly battered the crops, diminishing the effect of a modest rain. Soon after, the discouraged tycoon started selling his Texas town and farms.
A statue of C.W. Post sits in front of the Garza County, Texas, courthouse (City of Post, Texas)
Renamed just plain Post, Texas, the community still exists, along with some of the buildings C.W. built. In 2023, Post had a population of about 3,500, not counting a statue of C.W. Post, which sits in front of the Garza County Courthouse.
Post devoted much of his later years to attacking labor unions. He lectured and published anti-union advertisements in newspapers around the country, and unions responded by organizing boycotts against Post products. In fairness, though, the Post company’s treatment of its own – nonunion – employees was generous.
C.W. Post divorced Ella, Marjorie’s mother, in 1904 and, at age 50, married his 27-year-old secretary, Leila. However, neither his second wife nor his wealth did much for C.W.’s nagging physical problems and definitely not for his mental health.
In March 1914, C.W. was rushed via a nonstop train from his last home in Santa Barbara, California, to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where Drs. William and Charles Mayo themselves operated on him for – ironically, considering Grape-Nuts’ former advertising claim – appendicitis.
The operation was declared successful, and C.W. returned to Santa Barbara. But his stomach pain persisted, and on May 9, 1914, despondent over his illness, Post shot himself to death. He is buried in a substantial mausoleum in Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek.
The company C.W. Post founded and Marjorie Merriweather Post expanded was known in 2025 as Post Consumer Brands LLC. Products marketed under the Post name include such household staples as Gravy Train dog food, Chips Ahoy cookies, and Peter Pan peanut butter, among many others – including a variety of popular breakfast cereals. (C.W. Post’s first food product, Postum, was discontinued in 2007, but another company, Eliza’s Quest Foods, revived Postum in 2012.)
More information: C.W. Post’s views on health and how to attain it are laid out at length in his 1895 book; it can be read via Google Books. The full title is “I Am Well! The Modern Practice of Natural Suggestion as Distinct from Hypnotic or Unnatural Influence.”
Video: The first episode of a television mini-series, “The Food That Built America” (Hulu, 2019) includes a dramatized account of the cereal competition between Post and the Kelloggs. The narration is relatively factual, but the video shows Post sneaking the recipe for what would become Grape-Nuts out of a desk belonging to Will Kellogg. There is no evidence that incident ever happened.
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