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John Wayne Birthplace & Museum

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Winterset, IA
John Wayne Birthplace & Museum

The John Wayne Birthplace & Museum includes his birth home and a museum with the largest collect The Birthplace home is open daily.
(1175)

We are open seven days a week, 10:00am to 5:00pm except Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Easter. Tickets are purchased at the Welcome Center, just north of the Birthplace home. The new John Wayne Birthplace Museum, adjacent to the Birthplace home, opened May 23, 2015. Both the Museum and the Birthplace home are handicap accessible.

09/05/2026

When John Wayne decided to show off his moustache on film, it was always a great one in The Shootist, Rio Grande, and, of course, The Conqueror. As rare as these instances were, it was even rarer that Duke wore a beard. One of those rare instances was in Back to Bataan, playing Colonel Joseph Madden, where, even in promo photos, he sported a scruffy beard. He had an even bush of facial hair in the 19356 western, Texas Terror.

September 5 is World Beard Day, and as good a day as any to think about the scant John Wayne with facial hair films and wish that there were more. No matter how long the jungle mission, the cattle drive, or the fugitive hunt, John Wayne’s characters always seemed to have a basin of water and a sharp razor handy. But at least today we can say that was a heck of a beard. Happy World Beard Day, Duke.

09/03/2026

In 1927 William A. Wellman won the first Best Picture Oscar ever for Wings, one of the first and most influential aviation movies in history. Nearly thirty years later he directed another aviation masterpiece based on a 1944 novel. Island in the Sky was released on Septmeber 3, 1953 between, Trouble Along the Way and Hondo (it would be hard to find three more distinct films in one year).

Based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann, who also wrote the novel The High and the Mighty which would star John Wayne a year later, Islands in the Sky was based on actual events from 1943 when a WWII supply plane is forced to land on a frozen lake in the wilds of Canada in the dead of winter with no rescue on the immediate horizon and survival a remote possibility. In the film John Wayne plays pilot Captain John Dooley, an airline pilot drafted into flying supplies to Europe. Instead of the typical John Wayne war film, Islands in the Sky is a film about strong leadership and a fight against the elements.

Duke had a great cast of co-stars including Gunsmoke’s James Arness and Harry Carey Jr., and Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer of Our Gang fame.

08/31/2026

John Wayne starring in an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas is not a phrase you expect to hear, but in 1933, between the Big Trail and his breakout in Stagecoach, Duke starred in one of his early serials, about the French Foreign Legion and a terrorist named El Shaitan. The director that dropped John Wayne in this desert retelling of a Spanish classic was Colbert Clark, born August 31, 1898. The Three Musketeers was Colbert’s first directing job, and his cast included not only John Wayne, but John Chaney Jr., Noah Berry Jr., and Yakima Canutt.
Colbert spent most of his career as a producer rather than a director, racking up over 100 credits between The Three Musketeers and that TV show, Tales of the Texas Rangers in 1955, which starred Harry Lauter, who also appeared in Jet Pilot with Duke.

Only one of his nine directing credits, the Dumas-inspired Three Musketeers (1933) included John Wayne, but the year before he wrote two serials, The Shadow of the Eagle and Hurricane Express, which also included a young John Wayne.

While that was the end of his association with Duke, his brother-in-law, William Witney, directed two television shows based on John Wayne movies, Hondo and The Cowboys.

08/29/2026

We here at the John Wayne Birthplace and Museum would like to wish a heartfelt Happy Birthday to the US Marine Corps Reserve. The Marine Corps Reserve was created in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson, a year before the United States entered WWI. In 1917, when Wilson threw the support of the US behind its European Allies, the Marine Corps Reserve included 32 enlisted Marines and three officers. By the time of the Armistice in 1918, there were over 6,000 Reservists.

The heroism of the Marines in WWI and WWII has been celebrated in film for half a century. John Wayne added his own tribute in 1949 with The Sands of Iwo Jima. We here at the museum want to add our own well wishes to this year’s birthday.

Happy birthday to the Marine Corps Reserve. You have our admiration and our appreciation.

08/28/2026

In the midst of the Korean War, John Wayne waded once again into the Battle of the Pacific in World War II. On August 28, 1951, Flying Leathernecks was released by RKO Pictures. James Edward Grant handled the script; aside from Flying Leathernecks, Grant also wrote worked on eleven more John Wayne films, including Donovan's Reef and Trouble Along the Way. The film was funded by Howard Hughes, who would produce Duke in The Conqueror a few years later. It was Howard Hughes who decided that the film would be shot in Technicolor and utilize real color footage from WWII. RKO assigned Flying Leathernecks to Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Guitar).

John Wayne plays Marine pilot Daniel Kirby, based on real-life Medal of Honor winner Major John L. Smith, famous for shooting down nineteen Japanese planes over Guadalcanal in 1942. Opposite Duke, playing Captain/Major Carl "Griff" Griffin, is Robert Ryan better known for playing Col. Everett Dasher Breed in the Dirty Dozen, a film that John Wayne turned down. Reportedly, Nicholas Ray chose Robert Ryan to play opposite John Wayne because he believed that since Ryan had been a boxer in college, an audience might just believe that he might be tough enough to whoop John Wayne, if the picture required it. Not sure about that, but it did make for great cinema.

08/25/2026

Fall is on the way and there’s no place better than Winterset, Iowa in the fall, birthplace of The Duke! Our museum is a one of a kind tribute to our hometown hero!

08/20/2026

What is better than seeing a movie you love on the big screen? Seeing a movie about your favorite movie on the big screen. Well, John Wayne fans, that is happening soon.

On September 26 in Wilmette, Illinois, north of Chicago, the Annual Irish American Movie Hooley film festival will be screening Se Merry Doyle's celebration of Duke’s favorite Irish film director, John Ford.

JOHN FORD DREAMING THE QUIET MAN tells the story of John Ford's two-decade struggle to make the greatest Irish film in cinema history. The story of the making of The Quiet Man is well known to John Wayne Fans. Ford bought the rights to the story for $10 in 1933 and spent twenty years trying to find a studio that shared his vision. When Republic finally agreed to let him make the film, it was on the condition that Ford and Duke make Rio Grande first. Republic knew a John Wayne western would make a profit; they were less certain about a love story about a retired Irish boxer. History proved Ford right. The Quiet Man became a legend, and Republic made a lot of money off both pictures.

JOHN FORD DREAMING THE QUIET MAN features interviews with, among others, Martin Scorsese, Maureen O'Hara, and Peter Bogdanovich.

Also attending the September 26 screening in Wilmette will be special guest, our own Brian Downes, Executive Director of the John Wayne Birthplace & Museum, and massive fan of The Quiet Man. So point yourself toward the Windy City, where you can meet Brian and a theater full of Duke fans for a movie about your favorite movie, JOHN FORD DREAMING THE QUIET MAN.

See you there.

08/19/2026

If you work behind the scenes in Hollywood long enough, you end up working on every kind of movie imaginable. An actor may try their hand at lots of different roles, but those composers, producers, and stuntmen who were present at the dawn of film and stayed around for decades saw and did everything. One of those Hollywood workhorses was born on August 19, 1902, in Huntington, Indiana. Robert H. Planck had his first credit as a cinematographer in 1929, Three Live Ghosts, directed by Thornton Freeland (better known as the director of the original Brewster's Millions in 1935) and starring Dennis Hoey, who would stand beside John Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch in 1948.

Between 1929 and 1942, Planck did a little of everything. He worked on westerns (Life in the Raw), escaped convicts (Strange Cargo with Clark Gable), gangsters (Let Em Have It), sports (Hold That Coed), and classics (The Man in the Iron Mask). In 1942, he finally got his chance to work with John Wayne, just a few years past his breakout in Stagecoach. Planck worked with Duke on the WWII adventure/romance film, Reunion in Paris. Set against the N**i invasion of France, Duke played a downed American RAF pilot. The film also starred Joan Crawford and John Carrridine. If you haven’t had a chance to see it, it is a bit of a departure from most of Duke’s WWII films.

Duke and Planck never worked together again, but his connection to John Wayne never ended. Over the next twenty years, Robert Herbert Planck was nominated for an Academy Award four times, for Anchors Aweigh (with Frank Sinatra, Duke’s costar in Cast a Giant Shadow), Three Musketeers (With Lana Turner from The Sea Chase), Little Women (Peter Lawford in The Longest Day), and Lili (Mel Ferrer in Brannigan). Every step of the way, the great actors who strode the screen with John Wayne kept popping up in the best movies that Planck made.

His final credit was as director of photography for the TV show My Three Sons. And yes. William Frawley, who played Bub O’Casey on 165 episodes of My Three Sons, shared the screen with Duke in both The Fighting Seabees and Fame of the Barbary Coast.

Happy birthday to Robert Herbert Planck.

08/12/2026

Over the past few years, vinyl albums have made an incredible comeback and among the most popular are classic film soundtracks. For all of vinyl's recent popularity and the number of reissues that come out every year, there are currently no vinyl reissues of John Wayne soundtracks in print.

John Wayne's films featured music by some of the greatest film composers of the last century. Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith, among others.

Music from The Alamo, The High and Mighty, and True Grit were all nominated for Academy awards. The Quiet Man soundtrack was nominated for a Golden Globe. And still … no vinyl.

August 12 is National Vinyl Record Day and a perfect time to talk about which John Wayne soundtrack you would like to see pressed in vinyl. Is it the sweeping theme from The Searchers, Dean Martin singing My Rifle My Pony & Me from Rio Bravo, or Henry Mancini's Baby Elephant Walk from Hatari!?

What famous John Wayne music would you like to see reissued in vinyl. Drop your suggestions below. I'm voting for Donovan’s Reef just so I can hear Pearly Shells.

Address

205 S John Wayne Drive
Winterset, IA
50273

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 4pm
Tuesday	10am - 4pm
Wednesday	10am - 4pm
Thursday	10am - 4pm
Friday	10am - 4pm
Saturday	10am - 4pm
Sunday	10am - 4pm

Website

https://www.johnwaynebirthplace.museum/

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