Battle Creek

City in Calhoun County, south Michigan, USA; population (2000) 53,400. It is located 36 km/22 mi east of Kalamazoo. Seventh-Day Adventists built a sanatorium here in 1866. One of its directors, John Kellogg (1876–1943), experimented with foods, leading to the production of ready-to-eat cereals, which became the city's biggest industry. This enterprise turned international after W K Kellogg (his younger brother) and C W Post marketed the ideas and products on a wider scale. Auto parts, farm equipment, paper products, and trucks are also manufactured in the city.

Founded in 1831 and named for a skirmish between Native Americans and a surveying party (1825), it became a flour and wool milling centre. It was incorporated as a city in 1859. Battle Creek was an important station on the Underground Railroad, an escape route for black slaves established before the Civil War. It was home to the US antislavery and women's-suffrage campaigner Sojourner Truth, who is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Battle Creek has a symphony, theater, and art centre, as well as Kellogg Community College (1956).