John Wayne and Winterset: Iowa's Most Reluctant Native Son

About thirty-five miles south of Des Moines, the small county seat of Winterset, Iowa, population around five thousand, sits on a gentle ridge in Madison County. Madison County is more widely known today for its covered bridges, which became famous through a nineteen ninety-two novel and then a Clint Eastwood film. But before the bridges, Winterset had a different piece of American mythology parked in the corner of its downtown: the birthplace of John Wayne.

Marion Robert Morrison was born in Winterset on May twenty-sixth, nineteen oh seven, in a small house on South Second Street. His family left Iowa when he was a small child, first for nearby Earlham and then for California, and he did not return to Iowa for most of his adult life. He became John Wayne in Hollywood, where he worked as a prop man and a bit player before John Ford cast him in Stagecoach in nineteen thirty-nine and made him a star. Over the following four decades, he appeared in more than a hundred and fifty films and became one of the most recognizable human faces on earth.

Wayne was not what you could call a sentimental Iowan. He identified with the West, specifically the cinematic West of Monument Valley and the cattle drive. Iowa does not appear in his mythology. He returned to Winterset only occasionally and did not speak publicly about his birthplace with any frequency.

The birthplace home is maintained as a museum. It is a modest structure, two stories, white clapboard, the kind of house that a pharmacist's family would have occupied in nineteen oh seven. A bronze statue of Wayne, in his characteristic stance, hat, bandana, squinting slightly at the distance, stands outside the birthplace home.

Iowa has fewer native sons of comparable global fame. The state claims him with a degree of enthusiasm that suggests it is aware of the irony, he spent almost none of his life here.