In October 1890, the brothers O.S. Phelps and Neil S. Phelps, a Battle Creek industrialist, opened a competing "san" across the street from the world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium. The business failed by 1904, but the building survived more than eight decades. In 1904, it was purchased by C.W. Post and was left vacant until 1907, when Bernarr MacFadden, culturist and magazine publisher, bought the building and opened Bernarr MacFadden Sanatorium, an enterprise that lasted three years. John Harvey Kellogg bought the building in 1914 and used it as the headquarters for the Race Betterment Foundation as well as a dormitory for nursing students at Battle Creek College. It later became the Sanitarium Annex, but it was not until 1942, after the sale of "the San" to the U.S. Army for a military hospital, that it became the Sanitarium's main building. At the time of its demolition in 1986, it was reportedly the largest fieldstone building in North America.