The Oatmeal King: Ferdinand Schumacher and American Breakfast
Near Akron, Ohio
When Ferdinand Schumacher arrived in Akron from Germany in eighteen fifty-one, he opened a small grocery store. He noticed immediately that almost nobody in Ohio ate oats. Ohioans grew oats in abundance. They fed them to horses. The idea of cooking oats for a human meal struck most locals as slightly absurd.
Schumacher disagreed. In eighteen fifty-six, he bought a small mill along the canal and set up machinery to grind oats into a form people could actually cook and eat. At first, he sold it door to door from a hand cart. Then by the barrel. Then by the trainload.
By the eighteen eighties, his plant in Akron was selling three hundred sixty thousand pounds of oatmeal every day. He was known nationally as the Oatmeal King, and Akron had become the center of what would eventually be the American breakfast food industry. Schumacher pioneered the idea of selling oats in paper packaging rather than scooping them loose from barrels, which made them portable, sanitary, and brandable.
After a series of mergers and acquisitions involving several competing oat mills, the business eventually became Quaker Oats, incorporated in nineteen oh-one. The iconic Quaker man on the packaging, trademarked in eighteen seventy-seven, was the first registered trademark for any cereal brand in American history.
The Quaker Square Hotel in downtown Akron occupies the former grain silos where those oats were stored. The circular rooms inside the hotel cylinders are a direct architectural legacy of a German immigrant who looked at a horse's breakfast and saw a business empire.
