John Wayne Birthplace and Museum

Four-room cottage where Marion Robert Morrison was born in 1907

Address 216 South 2nd Street, Winterset

A small white frame house with four rooms and a museum addition next door, dedicated to the actor born here in 1907. The cottage itself takes about ten minutes to walk through — a kitchen, a parlour, two bedrooms — set up roughly as it would have been when the Morrison family lived there. The adjacent museum, opened in 2015, is larger and holds film posters, costumes, scripts, a collection of his hats, and the eyepatch from True Grit.

Worth an hour if you have any interest in Hollywood Westerns. Modest admission, closed major holidays.

things to do museum
A story
He was born Marion Robert Morrison on 26 May 1907; his father was the local pharmacist. The family left Winterset when he was three. The studio that made him a star renamed him after a Revolutionary War general.