Mme. Kellogg / The Kellogg French Tailor System

Mme. Kellogg (1847-1937) - The Kellogg French Tailor System

Mme. Kellogg was born Martha E. Kinnie on December 5, 1847, to Timothy Kinnie and Charlotte Barney of Michigan.[1] Martha married Frank Jonas Kellogg (1845-1916) Jun 7, 1874, and moved to Battle Creek, Michigan.[2] By 1883, Martha was living in Detroit, Michigan and going by the professional name of Mme. Kellogg where she ran her School of Ladies’ French Tailoring and taught her dressmaking system, The Kellogg French Tailor System of Dress Cutting.[3] Mme. Kellogg secured patents for her Tracing Wheel, No. 261,359 on July 18, 1882, and her Tailor’s Measure, No. 435,182 on August 26, 1890. Patent No. 235,776, granted December 21, 1880, for Apparatus for Drafting Patterns, initially lists F. J. Kellogg as the inventor, though on page 2, the application finishes with Mrs. F. J. Kellogg as the describer.[4] Patent No. 290,889, Rule of Measure granted on December 25, 1883, is assigned to her husband, F. J. Kellogg as inventor.

The apparatus for drafting patterns and the tailor measures are the core of Mme. Kellogg’s French Tailor System. The system consisted of an Instruction Book, Tailor's Wooden Square, Scales, Dart and Sleeve Ruler and Measure Book. In 1880 the cost was $10 for the full set.[5] Mme. Kellogg found success with her French Tailor System beyond her dressmaking school and received many awards and medals for her inventions. In April 1890, Chicago was chosen to host the 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. When the Fair opened in 1893, the Women’s Building was the first formal structure to be completed.[6] Besides celebrating the ingenuity of the World’s peoples, Congress also provided a national awards system to grant those deemed superior in their achievements with certificates and medals. People from all over entered their inventions at the World’s Columbian Exposition hoping to have their idea or product displayed and deemed the best on the world’s stage. Mme. Kellogg, residing in Battle Creek, Michigan during this time, entered her French Tailor System for dress cutting and design. By October of 1893 she had earned six ribbons, medals, and diplomas for her invention.[7] The Official Catalogue of Exhibits, World’s Columbian Exposition, Women’s Building, 1893 notes several of these awards as Department F Machinery - Group 77 Miscellaneous Hand Tools, Department H Manufacturers - Group 104 Clothing and Costume, and Department L Liberal Arts - Group 149 Education.[8] 

At the 11^th Annual Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1882, her French Tailor System won a silver medal for ‘superiority over all other systems of dress cutting’.[9] The Board of Trade and Chamber of Commerce at the Ohio Mechanics Institute awarded the system a Bronze Medal in 1882 and a Silver Medal in 1883.[10] In 1889 and 1890 the system was awarded the Medal of Superiority by the American Institute, New York.[11] In 1890, Mme. Kellogg sued Albert J. Pratt for libel for intimating that her dress system was inferior; Pratt was charged and fined. The case was finally settled for six cents for Kellogg.[12] In 1888, the sixth edition of The Franco-Prussian Mode “Method” by H. Ayers Jackson mentions bringing suits against parties using Kellogg's French Tailor System as he felt the Kellogg system was just a copy of his ‘Method’. According to Mme. Kellogg’s comments in an 1887 newspaper article, no legal actions were ever brought against Kellogg or individuals instructing dressmaking using her system.[13]

In October 1893, Martha E. Kellogg was granted a divorce from Frank J. Kellogg and moved her school of dressmaking to 210 State Street, Chicago.[14] With retirement in the late 1920s, Mme. Kellogg settled in Orlando, Florida. Ten years later she died after falling on the carpet of her home and breaking her right arm. She would pass within the week of this fall at the Florida Sanitarium and was buried April 12, 1937, in an unmarked grave at Greenwood Cemetery, Orlando, Orange County, Florida.[15] As a dressmaker, Mme. Kellogg, not only successfully arbitrated in court that her system of dress cutting was superior, but with the multiple awards and patents proved to her students, potential students, and her rivals, she had indeed invented a superior system, one worth remembering, studying, and understanding. In Mme. Kellogg’s words “in introducing the French Tailor System to the public, the inventor claims that it meets every demand for simplicity, accuracy, economy of time and material, and ease of comprehension” and that “the correctness of this proposition has been recognized by the United States Patent Commissioner, who has granted this system, and its application of principles, the full protection of the law by Letters Patent, which can be seen at my office, bearing the seal of the United States Patent Office.”[16]