In the fertile valley below Kellogg Hill--the...

In the fertile valley below Kellogg Hill--the last traffic jam point between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire--stands the Cal Poly Pomona campus, where horses mix with higher education.

It is home to Southern California’s premier agriculture school as well as to the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center, which for nearly 70 years has been devoted to breeding and training horses.

The Arabian horse, like Kellogg, is not native to California. Kellogg had made a fortune on cornflakes and wanted to indulge his passion for Arabians, which he had loved from the time he owned a half-Arabian pony as a child.

Will Keith Kellogg was born in Battle Creek, Mich., on April 7, 1860, a year before the Civil War began. The boy was 7 when he started working after school in his father’s broom factory. And seven years after that, he quit school to become a broom salesman.

Tired of sweeping in minimal profits, Kellogg started experimenting with new health foods. He worked as a “flunky,” as he later described it, to his older brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a surgeon and the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a fashionable health spa. One of his jobs was to run alongside his brother’s bicycle taking dictation.

The elder brother developed nut- and soy-based meat substitutes, but it was W.K. Kellogg who created “wheat flakes” and served them to his brother’s patients.

By the turn of the century, Kellogg put cornflakes on the market and started to change the breakfast habits of the nation.

He also left his brother’s employ after a bitter fight. With $35,000 in savings, Kellogg launched the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. in 1906, later becoming the W.K. Kellogg Co.

It made him rich, and in 1924 Kellogg decided to come to California to build a winter home.

He left Battle Creek in a forerunner of today’s motor home that he called his “automobile camping rig.” The press dubbed it “Kellogg’s Ark.” It was one of a kind: 27 feet long, with a kitchen, bathroom, heater, ice machine, toaster, radio, hot water tank, folding chairs that made into beds, even a telephone. A 16-foot motorboat was carried on the roof for some spur-of-the-moment fishing.

He checked in at the Biltmore Hotel and on the flip of a coin decided to buy 400 acres of the Pomona Valley. Eventually he created an 800-acre ranch with stables and training facilities for his horses, which he had sent here from all over the world.

His Spanish-style villa, built atop Kellogg Hill, was designed by Myron Hunt and H.C. Chambers, two of the premier architects of early 20th-Century Southern California, at a staggering cost of $100,000. A home for Kellogg’s son, Dr. Karl H. Kellogg, was erected at the bottom of the hill.

A masterly booster of his products, Kellogg invited the public to Sunday afternoon horse shows, where he gave away boxes of cereal. Cars would jam the lot around the arena where Kellogg paraded his Arabian foals, mares and stallions. The public also came to see Jadaan, the world-famous stallion in Rudolph Valentino’s last film, “Son of the Sheik.”

In 1932, a crowd of 25,000 filled the grandstands and surrounding hillsides to watch Kellogg sign a piece of paper deeding his ranch to the state universities, along with a $600,000 endowment fund.

The UCLA band enlivened the crowd as an old Concord coach--driven by William Banning of the pioneer family and accompanied by master of ceremonies Will Rogers--rumbled into the arena.

The land lay untouched until World War II, when the state universities transferred title of the ranch and its 87 horses to the Army but retained the $600,000 endowment.

The Army never got around to using the horses, and at the end of the war tried to return the property but the state refused. The ranch and its horses had become white elephants.

So in 1949, the Army gave the ranch to the Southern California campus of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on the condition that Kellogg’s fine Arabians would continue to be bred and shown. In 1966, the site became Cal Poly Pomona.

By the time Kellogg died in 1951 at the age of 91, he had given away not only his ranch but about $48 million to agricultural, health and educational charities.

Six years after Kellogg died, a 350-year-old sycamore behind the new student dorms fell during a storm. In a large hole at the base of the tree was a strongbox that turned out to be a time capsule buried by Kellogg on Oct. 21, 1929, in honor of the golden anniversary of Edison’s light bulb.

In it were a replica of the first incandescent bulb, newspapers from that week--just before the devastating stock market crash--and a photo of Kellogg with actors Clara Bow and Gary Cooper standing by the sycamore, on the day the treasure was buried.

Today, of Kellogg’s original ranch, only three buildings remain. The family villa on the hilltop, partially hidden by a cluster of trees, can be seen from the San Bernardino Freeway. The villa was renamed University House and is used for faculty receptions and some architecture and music classes.

Karl Kellogg’s home at the foot of the hill, now known as the Manor House, is the official home of Cal Poly’s president. The original U-shaped stables in the middle of the campus, with their landscaped courtyard, function as the student center, and horse stalls are used for offices.

New stables were built in the southeast corner of the 1,400-acre campus and the school gives public exhibitions on the first Sunday of every month, October through June. Many of the horses are descendants of Kellogg’s stock. The only outsiders

are the mares brought in from around the country to be bred to the center’s prized Arabian stud, Reign On.