National Farm Toy Museum

Dyersville, Iowa calls itself the Farm Toy Capital of the World, and it has a reasonable claim. In nineteen forty-five, a machinist named Fred Ertl Senior founded the Ertl Company in Dubuque. By nineteen fifty-nine, Ertl had moved to Dyersville and was producing die-cast toy replicas of John Deere, International Harvester, and Case tractors that ended up under Christmas trees on farms across the country.

The National Farm Toy Museum opened here in nineteen eighty-six to house this history, and today its collection runs to some thirty thousand pieces. The museum draws over thirty thousand visitors a year and anchors a town that also happens to be near the Field of Dreams baseball diamond.