Welcome to the Aldercrest Annex, the former original home of Kellogg Middle School from November of 1962 until 1986, though an arson would significantly damage the school's library and activity center in 1982, and it would eventually relocate to the Thomas Hunt Morgan Middle School, which would then be remodeled and renamed to Kellogg.
My wife grew up right down the road and actually built a tree fort near to GZ when she was a kid with her friends.
Kellogg Middle School was named after Frank Billings Kellogg, a Nobel Prize winner who was born on December 22nd, 1856 and passed away a day before his 81st birthday from pneumonia following a stroke, on December 21st, 1937. A story that is unique to the United States is that of Mr. Frank Billings Kellogg, a country boy who became a global celebrity by co-authoring a treaty that prohibited war. Although Frank Kellogg was born in Potsdam, New York, the Kellogg family eventually settled on a wheat farm in Elgin, Minnesota, after joining the nationwide westward migration that swept the nation at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Kellogg had a sketchy at best formal education. After spending a year or two in New York State, he attended a country school in Minnesota from his ninth to his twelfth year of education.
After working on the family farm for five years, he moved to Rochester, Minnesota, to work as a handyman for a farmer that had set up a small operation there. He used textbooks and any other book to educate himself in the subjects of Latin, and German, with a particular interest in law and history.
After passing the state bar exam in 1877, he was appointed Rochester's city attorney and Olmsted County's attorney just two years later, quite the meteoric rise for the farmboy from New York. Frank Kellogg was recruited to join his cousin Cushman Kellogg Davis's law firm in 1887 after the prominent St. Paul attorney and later US senator took a notice to Frank Kellogg's drive, perseverance, and aptitude.
Over the next two plus decades, Kellogg amassed a sizeable fortune. As a result of his growing wealth and status, he became a friend of some of the major business leaders of the day, including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and James J. Hill. Mr. Kellogg also became an attorney for some of the railroads, iron mining companies, and steel manufacturing firms that developed the rich Mesabi iron range in Minnesota.
In spite of these connections, Kellogg became a national celebrity as a trustbuster. He expressed his belief to a newspaper in St. Paul in 1904 that the General Paper Company, a trust that served as the marketing arm for several paper industries in Minnesota and Wisconsin, was a combination in trade restriction. Kellogg was subsequently invited to prosecute the firm as a special attorney of the United States government by President Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he had become acquainted with and periodically visited at the White House. Kellogg would be elected American Bar Association president in 1912.
Mr. Kellogg was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1916, taking his office on March 4th, 1917, just in time to cast a ballot in Congress on April 6th, the day America entered the first World War.
Over the course of his six-year term, Kellogg supported Woodrow Wilson in all of his endeavors, favored agricultural legislation, and made a concerted effort to secure senatorial ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations Covenant, despite his mild reservations about the latter. A notoriously terrible campaigner, Kellogg failed in his bid for a second Senate term that was to begin in 1922. President Coolidge, who took over as president after Harding's death in August of 1923, appointed him as ambassador to the Court of St. James's, much to his surprise and the disapproving press's.
President Harding had sent him on his first diplomatic assignment in March of 1923 as a delegate to the fifth Pan-American Conference, which was held in Chile. During his fourteen months in England, the London Reparations Conference, which was held to receive the findings of the Dawes Committee, was the most significant diplomatic event in which he participated.
As secretary of state in Coolidge's cabinet, Kellogg took over from Charles Evans Hughes in 1925 and remained in that role until 1929. Following his belief in the effectiveness of international arbitration, Kellogg negotiated for bilateral treaties to be signed with nineteen foreign countries. None of the eighty treaties of various kinds he signed while in office—a total surpassing William Jennings Bryan's record established between 1913 and 1915—meant as much to him as the Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
The French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, started the negotiations for the treaty by releasing an open letter on April 6th, 1927, the tenth anniversary of America's entry into World War I, proposing a bilateral treaty of perpetual friendship between France and the United States that would forbid war between the two countries. After initially being chilly to the idea, Kellogg responded to Briand on December 28th, 1927, by recommending the signing of a multilateral agreement that forbade the use of force as a tool of national politics. After putting out the idea, Kellogg put his extraordinary efforts into seeing it through to completion. The sixty-four signatories of the Pact signed it on August 27th, 1928, and it was declared on July 24th, 1929.
Despite the fact that the Pact was dissolved within months of its announcement due to armed war in Manchuria, Kellogg did not lose hope in its validity during his remaining eight years of life. Early in 1929, Kellogg made his way back to St. Paul. In the months that followed, he toured widely in America and Europe and was bestowed with several awards, including the French Legion of Honor, the Nobel Peace Prize, and honorary doctorates from numerous universities. He was elected to a full term on the Permanent Court of International Justice after taking up Hughes's unexpired term in 1930. But in 1935, his health began to decline, and he was obliged to leave the Court and retire to his St. Paul, Minnesota, home. Mr. Kellogg would pass away at the age of 80, just one day shy of his 81st birthday, on December 21st, 1937.
“We also realize that the collaboration of all nations, of which the Kellogg Pact is the great outcome, must be extended to fields other than the purely political.”
- Johan Ludwig Mowinckel, Member of the Nobel Committee, Presentation Speech, Oslo, Norway, December 10th, 1930.
“I desire most to express my deep appreciation of the great honor you have conferred upon me; an honor I value more than any I have ever received, not only on account of the noble cause for which this great prize is awarded– a cause which I, with you, have deeply at heart– but because I feel in honoring me you have honored my country and its devotion– to the cause of peace and the development of higher civilization.”
- Frank Billings Kellogg, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway, December 10th, 1930.
Ample street parking nearby to the cache, though I'd watch for glass and other detritus.
Upon your walk to the cache site, you might notice the faint outline of a track that once stood here, though its hard to tell these days.
Please replace with camo when done for the next person to enjoy.
This is a small size cache, with room for a log and some swag, though you will need to bring your own pen. Its been stocked with outdoorsy stickers, some seashells and mini turtles, and a couple Seafair Pirates dubloons from over the years.
Thank you if you took the time to read the whole description, it's a fascinating story.