Historic ‘Cream of Wheat’ art on display at Grand Forks’ Olive Ann Hotel

GRAND FORKS – A helping of nutritional history is on display – celebrating the first hot breakfast cereal, produced by Grand Forks entrepreneurs – in the coffee shop at The Olive Ann Hotel. in downtown Grand Forks.

Four pieces of original artwork used for nationwide advertising and marketing of Cream of Wheat – which was launched here more than 130 years ago – adorn the walls in the hotel’s Sweetwaters Coffee and Tea shop, 14 N. Fourth St.

The paintings are part of the collection owned by Bruce Gjovig, a Grand Forks author and art collector. A free booklet, describing the collection and the history of Cream of Wheat, is available on site.

About a decade ago, Gjovig began searching online for Cream of Wheat advertising images, amassing 13 pieces of original art as they became available, mostly from galleries on the East Coast, he said. The galleries had acquired the art from collectors, and made them available for sale to the public.

Another four paintings from Gjovig’s collection were shown at Sweetwaters Coffee and Tea starting in January. The hotel management plans to continue to show pieces of the collection on a rotating basis, he said.

Much of the art is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s work. They depict scenes such as children sledding or flying a kite. The artists represented in this collection are Edward Brewer, Haddon Sundblom, Frank Hoffman, J.A. Cahill, Frederic Kimball Mizen and Leslie Thrasher.

At the top of one of Brewer’s images, “Well Fortified,” the children, dressed in winter jackets and caps and poised with snowballs in hand, are believed to be kids who lived in Brewer’s St. Paul neighborhood, Gjovig said.

But Brewer, for example, was 10 years older than Rockwell, so Brewer may have actually influenced Rockwell’s style, rather than vice versa, he said.

Brewer created 102 of the enormously popular full-page Cream of Wheat ads that appeared monthly in dozens of national magazines, Gjovig said. The folksy ads have become collector’s items.

“Cream of Wheat is the oldest trademark from North Dakota still in use, dating from Jan. 23, 1900,” Gjovig wrote in the booklet. “The Cream of Wheat advertising campaign is remembered as one of the most successful branding efforts in American history.”

“In 1980, Nabisco archivist, David Stivers, discovered over 500 original artworks and 1,100 sketching, drawings, and artifacts in metal cabinets at the Cream of Wheat plant in Minneapolis,” he said.

“The Cream of Wheat advertising art collection is one of the most significant art collection finds of the century, documenting not only the advertising history of the company, but providing a meaningful narrative of the styles, manners, and mores consciously protected during the early years of the 20th century. Emery Mapes made a lasting gift by wrapping and saving each artwork he commissioned, an art collection appraised at over $1 million in 1980 ($3.3 million today).”

With this display, and by sharing the art with the public, Gjovig hopes to increase awareness of Cream of Wheat as the first hot breakfast cereal in the nation, he said.

He has long had an interest in Cream of Wheat because the company was founded in Grand Forks.

The desire to offer the show in a public setting is also borne of his decades-long interest in art and in the impactful innovations by resourceful and creative entrepreneurs in this part of the country. Along with co-author Hiram Drache, Gjovig wrote the book, “”Innovative Entrepreneurs of North Dakota and Northwest Minnesota”.

Other examples of Gjovig’s art collection are on display at the Altru Professional Center, 4440 S. Washington, and the Alerus Center, 1200 S. 42nd St.

Gjovig has been celebrating and shining the spotlight on Cream of Wheat and its roots in Grand Forks for some time. He served as chairman of the 1993 Cream of Wheat Centennial Committee and convinced company officials to hold the celebration in Grand Forks, rather than Minneapolis or New Jersey.

The company moved from Grand Forks to Minneapolis in 1897, according to a Sept. 3, 1961, article in the Minneapolis Tribune. (The article is based on an interview with George Bull’s son, Daniel, a 1906 UND mechanical engineering graduate who led the Cream of Wheat Corporation for 41 years, until 1960.)

The 1993 Cream of Wheat centennial, held in October, was “a national news event,” Gjovig said, “and we served breakfast to more than 6,000 people, out at the university.”

The story of Cream of Wheat began in 1890 when local leaders George Bull, a farmer, and Emery Mapes, a businessman, started a flour mill, Diamond Milling Co., with machinery Mapes acquired in a fire sale in Minnesota. The mill was located near the railroad tracks on South Fifth Street, the current site of the city’s police department, Gjovig said.

Three years later, George Clifford, a local banker joined the pair and provided more capital for the venture.

However, the Financial Panic of 1893 threatened to derail the company, Gjovig said. “(The owners) just about went out of business. As a matter of fact, they tried to sell the company, but didn’t find any buyers, and so the debt-holders had to convert their debt to equity.”

The head miller, recruited to Grand Forks from Jamestown, North Dakota, Tom Amidon suggested to his bosses that the company package and sell farina, also known as “middlings,” which is left when the bran and the wheat germ are removed in the wheat milling process.

Amidon had been taking the farina home where his wife used it to make a breakfast porridge.

His bosses eventually agreed, and named the product Cream of Wheat because of its white appearance. They made boxes, with illustrated labels, “and that’s where actually the (image of the) chef with the saucepan over his shoulder was started.”

Along with a regular shipment of flour, the company sent 50 packages of Cream of Wheat to a customer in New York City. Within 12 hours after that carload arrived, the New York flour brokers wired back, requesting 50 more cases of Cream of Wheat, according to Gjovig.

The next day, another telegram was even more encouraging: “Never mind shipping us your flour. Send us a carload of Cream of Wheat!” he wrote. “As of Oct. 6, 1893, they were now in the hot cereal business, not flour milling.”

The image of the Black chef, whose friendly, welcoming grin graced advertisements and the front of the Cream of Wheat box for decades, is believed to be that of Frank White.

While dining in a Chicago restaurant, Mapes noticed the waiter and paid him to pose for a photo after work at a nearby photography studio, according to MyNortheaster.com. The image of became a cultural and corporate icon. (White’s image, or another like it, was on the package until after the death of George Floyd in 2020, when it was replaced by a stalk of wheat. White died in 1938.)

From that photo, artist Edward Brewer created a bust that was used as a model for painting images of the face from different angles, Gjovig said.

Other than White’s face, well-known artists, who were commissioned by Mapes, “had great latitude” in the images they created for Cream of Wheat ads, Gjovig said.

One of the paintings displayed at Sweetwaters Coffee and Tea, titled “Menu, Cream of Wheat,” features a cutout of a photo of White’s face applied to the surface. In his smile, a missing tooth was filled in, Gjovig said.

Mapes was very particular about the Cream of Wheat brand image and was ever-diligent in protecting the trademark, Gjovig said.

Mapes, a printer and newspaper publisher who came to Grand Forks from Mapes, North Dakota – the Nelson County town he founded and named – “was a marketing genius,” Gjovig said. That talent “really didn’t show up, in some ways, until he was in this company.

“And he really knew and understood the value of visual art in terms of marketing and promotion and building a brand. … He was very successful at marketing and branding.”

At the turn of the 20th century, he capitalized on the new technology of four-color printing that was just introduced in magazines.

Under Mapes’ leadership, Cream of Wheat ads were not text-heavy, which was common, but “art-intensive” to sell the product, Gjovig said. And they depicted “the product with images of warmth and comfort and often with humor around healthy, active children in homes. …

“And Mapes was also a genius in placing these ads in women’s magazines – Ladies Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, etc.”

In magazines, Mapes made certain that Cream of Wheat ads were placed either on the back cover or inside the front cover, Gjovig said.

“Mapes refused to pay magazines for the number of issues printed, but rather for the number of issues sold,” he said. Publishers often printed tens of thousands of copies that did not sell.

Mapes led the effort to start the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which verifies the number of magazines sold, not printed, thus setting the industry standard for circulation-based ad buys.

Garnering the admiration of the advertising community, in 1913, Mapes was elected president of the Association of American Advertisers, Gjovig said.

With this display at The Olive Ann Hotel, Gjovig hopes to remind people of the significance of Cream of Wheat, an “innovation that kept a failing flour mill alive for the next 130 years,” he said.

Beyond that, “Cream of Wheat was an innovative leader in advertising art in, sort of, the ‘Golden Age of American Illustration’. I think a lot of people will recognize the style … and (may remember seeing these ads) in their grandparents’ home.

“Quite often people would take these advertisements and put it on their wall as art,” he said. “It was a cheap and efficient way of putting up high-quality art in their home – and by renowned artists too.”

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