📍Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site, 1620 Lindbergh Drive South, Little Falls, MN 56345, USA
1906 – 1920“My father, a lawyer and later a congressman, bought a farm on the bluffs above the Mississippi River just south of Little Falls, Minnesota, before I was born. Our first house there burned to the ground in 1905, when I was three; I remember the fire. We rebuilt a plainer farmhouse on the old stone foundation, and from 1907 it was our summer home, while winters were spent in Washington during my father's years in Congress. To me, Little Falls was freedom: the river, the woods, the fields and the barns. I was a solitary, practical boy. I explored the riverbank, swam, hunted and fished, and above all I loved machines. I took apart everything I could, and at eleven I was driving our family car around the farm and on long trips. In 1916 my father bought a Saxon Six, and we enlarged the house to make a garage for it beneath the sleeping porch. During the First World War, when food production mattered, we lived at the farm all year round and I ran it largely on my own as a teenager, buying livestock, a tractor and farm machinery and working the land. In 1920 I left for the University of Wisconsin to study engineering, but I left after three semesters to learn to fly. I became a barnstormer, an army pilot and an airmail flyer, and in 1927 I flew alone across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. In 1931 my family gave the farm to the state of Minnesota, and today the house, with the restored Saxon Six, is a museum within Charles A. Lindbergh State Park, beside the river where I grew up.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today