According to the Smithsonian Art Inventory Database, this statue of CW Post is an exact replica of a statue that citizens of Battle Creek, Michigan commissioned and erected in 1914, just a few years after Post committed suicide.
Post's daughter had an exact replica of the Battle Creek MI state made for the town of Post in 1956. It has been sitting in a place of honor in front of the Garza County courthouse ever since.
From the SIRIS Database: (
visit link)
"Artist: Gelert, Johannes Sophus, 1852-1923, sculptor.
Spampinato Art Workshop, founder.
Title: C. W. Post, (sculpture).
Other Titles: Charles William Post, (sculpture).
Dates: Original commissioned ca. 1914. Cast 1956.
Medium: Sculpture: bronze; Base: granite.
Inscription: (On front of base, incised lettering:) (In wreath:) 1854/C. W. Post/1914 (Below wreath:) PIONEER/INDUSTRIALIST/INVENTOR/FOUNDER OF POST, TEXAS/IN 1907
Description:
C. W. Post, seated in an armchair, wears a buttoned suit with lapels. The sculpture is mounted atop a square, inscribed base with a raised wreath on the front.
Subject: Portrait male -- Post, Charles William -- Full length
Owner: Administered by Garza County, Garza County Courthouse, Post, Texas 79356
Located Garza County Courthouse, On lawn, Post, Texas
Remarks:
The sculpture commemorates C. W. Post (Charles William Post) of cereal fame, who was born in 1854 and died in 1914. Early in his career he had been a Texas real estate developer with a desire to create a planned community. In 1907, work began this new community, the town that came to be known as Post, Texas. After his death, the citizens of Battle Creek, Michigan commissioned a statue of C.W. Post for their community. Later, C. W. Post's daughter, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had a duplicate casting of the Battle Creek statue made for the town of Post, Texas. A Texas Historical Commission marker about C. W. Post is at the left rear of the sculpture. IAS files contain related excerpts from Ann Ruff's "Amazing Texas Monuments and Museums," Houston, Texas: Lone Star Books, 1984, pg. 2-3; and from Carol Morris Little "A Comprehensive Guid to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas," Austin, TX: Univerity of Texas Press, 1996, pg. 359-360."
Eccentric millionaire inventor and industrialist C. W. Post hated labor unions in Battle Creek Michigan so much that in 1906 he bought a quarter of a million acres of arid land on the Texas Caprock and founded his own town.
No, REALLY.
This bronze statue of C. W. Post on a grey granite plinth stands in front of the east entrance to the Garza County Courthouse in downtown Post, the town he founded on what had heretofore been arid plains.
Post is seated in a chair with his legs crossed, wearing a suit. He stares straight ahead with a level gaze. One hand grasps the arm of the chair, the other is resting in his lap. He seems to either be sitting for a formal portrait of listening to a briefing from staff. Maybe he is conjuring up his next healthful concoction, or deciding when the next attempt at making it rain by blowing up lots of dynamite will be.
The plinth is made of grey granite, with a raised wreath around his name and vital dates, as follows:
"1854
C. W. POST
1914"
Beneath the wreath:
"PIONEER
INDUSTRIALIST
INVENTOR
Founder of Post, Texas
In 1907"
From the Handbook of Texas online: (visit link)
"POST, CHARLES WILLIAM (1854–1914). Charles William Post, cereal manufacturer and developer, was born on October 26, 1854, in Springfield, Illinois, to Charles Rollin and Caroline (Lathrop) Post. After graduating from the Springfield public schools he entered Illinois Industrial University (now the University of Illinois) at Urbana; he remained for only two years before abandoning school "for hard physical work."
At seventeen he went to Independence, Kansas, where he worked as a salesman, clerk, and store owner. He returned to Springfield in 1872 and worked for the next fourteen years as a salesman and manufacturer of agricultural machines. During this period he invented and secured patents on such farm equipment as cultivators, a sulky plow, a harrow, and a haystacker.
On November 4, 1874, Post married Ella Letitia Merriweather. They had one daughter. After living apart for several years they were divorced in 1904, and on November 7 of that year Post married Leila Young of Battle Creek, Michigan.
After a nervous breakdown in November 1885 caused by strain and overwork, he went to Texas in 1886 and in Fort Worth became associated with a group of real estate men who were developing a 300-acre tract in the eastern part of the city, an area now known as Riverside. (Mama Blaster, who is from Fort Worth. and whose father in law lived in Riverside in the 1940s. did NOT know that!)
Other members of the family, including Post's brother Rollin, followed C. W. (as he signed his name) to Fort Worth. In 1888 the Posts acquired a 200-acre ranch on the outskirts of the city and began the development of a subdivision on their property; they laid out streets and lots for homes and constructed a woolen mill and a paper mill.
In 1891 Post suffered a second breakdown and moved with his wife moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where he entered a sanitarium. With rest and the ministrations of a Christian Science practitioner came recuperation, and soon he was experimenting with a cereal drink he called Postum.
He subsequently developed Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties, breakfast foods that by the end of the century made him millions of dollars. He served as president of the American Manufacturers Association and of the Citizen's Industrial Association.
Post was a bitter opponent of labor unions and an advocate of the open shop.
In 1906, as a result of his desire to own a farming community in Texas, he purchased some 225,000 acres of ranchland along the escarpment of the Caprock in Garza and Lynn counties and designated a site near the center of Garza County as the location of his new town, which would be the county seat. In 1907 Post City, as it was called until after the developer's death, was platted, farms of 160 acres were laid out, shade trees were planted, and a machine shop, a hotel, a school, churches, and a department store were constructed. Post tried various forms of automatic machinery in developing dry-land farming techniques and introduced varieties of grain sorghums such as milo and kafir.
One of his most spectacular experiments was his rain-making effort through dynamite explosions. From firing stations along the rim of the Caprock four-pound dynamite charges were detonated every four minutes for a period of several hours. Between 1911 and 1914 he spent thousands of dollars in this endeavor, which met with little success.
Post's main contribution to Texas was opening the plains region to agricultural development. His health failed again in 1914, and he died, probably by suicide, on May 9, 1914, at his home in Santa Barbara, California. He is buried in Battle Creek, Michigan.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Charles Dudley Eaves and Cecil Allen Hutchinson, Post City, Texas: C. W. Post's Colonizing Activities in West Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952). Nettie Letich Major, C. W. Post (Washington: Judd and Detweiler, 1963). Jan Reid, "C. W. Post," Texas Monthly, March 1987."
The historic Double-U Ranch near town was Post's ranch headquarters when he was in town.