W.K. Kellogg, who founded the Toasted Corn Flake Company of Battle Creek in 1906, and his second wife, Dr. Carrie Staines, a physician at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, commissioned Benjamin and Benjamin of Grand Rapids in 1925 to design a summer house here. Their picturesque estate included this Neo-Tudor manor house, a windmill, a greenhouse, a stable, a boathouse, a combined guest house, garage and chauffeur's residence, and a caretaker's house, and Marshall Field and Company of Chicago decorated the interior. From 1944 to 1950 the estate served as a rehabilitation center for the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek. In 1952 the W.K. Kellogg Foundation gave the property to Michigan State College, now Michigan State University, which developed it as the Kellogg Gull Lake Biological Station.