The Battle Creek Sanitarium opened in 1866 as the Western Health Reform Institute, founded on health principles advocated by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. In 1876 Dr. John Harvey Kellogg became the sanitarium’s medical superintendent, and his innovations included radiation therapy for cancer patients and the invention of flaked cereal. After the sanitarium burned in 1902, a six-story Italian Renaissance Revival-style building designed by Dayton, Ohio, architect Frank M. Andrews was constructed the following year. Kellogg’s brother W. K. Kellogg worked there for twenty-six years before leaving to establish the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Company. In 1928 the sanitarium was enlarged with a fourteen-story towers addition and dining room annex designed by M. J. Morehouse of Chicago, but after the 1929 stock market crash business declined and the facility went into receivership in 1933. The sanitarium remained on the site until 1942, when the U.S. Army purchased the buildings and established Percy Jones General Hospital, named for an army surgeon whose thirty-year career included commanding ambulance units during World War I. The hospital specialized in neurosurgery, plastic surgery, and the fitting of artificial limbs, and approximately 100,000 military patients were treated there before it closed permanently in 1953. In 1954 the building became the Battle Creek Federal Center.