📍John Wayne Birthplace, 216 South 2nd Street, Winterset, IA 50273, USA
1907 – 1911“I was born Marion Robert Morrison in May 1907 in this little four-room wood-frame house in Winterset, Iowa, a quiet farming town in Madison County with a courthouse square and covered bridges over the creeks nearby. My father, Clyde, was a pharmacist who worked at a drugstore on the south side of the square, and my mother, Mary, was known to everyone as Molly. I weighed thirteen pounds at birth, and I was a big, healthy baby. We stayed in Winterset until I was about three, when my father moved us to Earlham, another small town in the county, where he opened his own drugstore. He was a gentle, kind man, but he wasn't a businessman, and money troubles followed us. When I was a boy his health failed, and the family moved west to California, eventually settling in Glendale. There, the local firemen started calling me Little Duke, after my Airedale terrier, Duke, who followed me everywhere, and the name stuck. I played football at Glendale High School and won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, and a summer job moving props at Fox Studios led me into films. John Ford made me a star in Stagecoach in 1939, and I played cowboys and soldiers for forty years. The house where I was born has been restored as it was in 1907, and next door the John Wayne Birthplace Museum tells my story to visitors from around the world.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today