1620 Lindbergh Dr S
Little Falls, MN, USA

Charles Lindbergh House and Museum

Spirit of St. Louis replica
Climb inside a full-scale replica of the Spirit of St. Louis cockpit and envision yourself performing a tricky takeoff in New York, surviving an ice storm over the ocean, and landing safely in Paris.

Films
View original footage of Lindbergh’s famous flight in a 1920s-style movie theater. In the 50-seat theater on the lower level, watch a 17-minute documentary briefly outlining key events from Lindbergh’s life. Films run continuously all day during museum hours, and by reservation for group tours.


Museum store
Bring home a memento of your visit! The store carries a number of books and gifts related to Lindbergh, Minnesota history, aviation, and WWII. Unique items include children's toys, games, Christmas ornaments, snow globes, and clothing. The store is open during regular site hours. In the off-season, the store is available by appointment.

Charles A. Lindbergh House and Park

Charles A. Lindbergh State Park is a 569-acre (2.3 km2) Minnesota state park on the outskirts of Little Falls. The park was once the farm of Congressman Charles August Lindbergh and his son Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. Their restored 1906 house and two other farm buildings are within the park boundaries. The house, a National Historic Landmark, and an adjacent museum are operated by the Minnesota Historical Society, known as the Charles Lindbergh House and Museum. Three buildings and three structures built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s were named to the National Register of Historic Places. These buildings include a picnic shelter and a water tower, built in the Rustic Style from local stone and logs, and have remained relatively unchanged since construction. Although the property includes shoreline on the Mississippi River, the Lindbergh family requested that the park not include intensive use areas for swimming or camping, so development was kept to a minimum.


History

Charles August Lindbergh, known as C.A., was a prominent lawyer and real estate trader in Little Falls. In March 1901 he married Evangeline Lodge Land, the college-educated descendant of two notable Detroit medical families, who had come to Little Falls the previous autumn as a teacher. She, C.A., and his two daughters from a previous marriage moved to a property, which C.A. had purchased for a dairy farm three years earlier. They had a three-story house built on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. A tenant's house was built across the road for the farm workers. Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in 1902, and would be the couple's only child. A barn was built later that year, and the farm was populated with cattle, goats, hogs, sheep, chickens, and pigeons as well as cats and dogs.

On August 5, 1905, a fire started for unknown reasons on the third floor. The house burned down to its stone foundation, but the Lindberghs and their servants escaped injury and managed to save many of the household items. The Lindberghs had a new house built on the foundation of the first. However it was much smaller, due to C.A.'s overextended finances and a growing strain in the marriage. The new house fit awkwardly onto the footprint of the old, necessitating a short hallway with seven doors leading off. The basement, intended as a library for C.A., and the upper floor was never finished. Instead, C.A. entered politics and in 1907 began serving the first of five consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. For the next decade the younger Charles spent much of each year in Detroit and Washington, D.C., living only two or three months at the house in Little Falls. However, Charles would credit his time spent on the farm and playing along the Mississippi for his strength and self-reliance. The unfinished upper floor became Charles' exclusive play area, and upon hearing an unusually loud engine one day in 1911 he climbed out onto the roof and saw his first airplane.

Evangeline's relationship with C.A. and his daughters worsened, and in 1917 she and Charles moved back into the house year-round. Charles continued sleeping in his bedroom, which was really a screened-in porch, on all but the very coldest winter nights. He began overseeing the farm and was an early adopter of mechanization technology. Charles left in 1920 to attend college and returned only once, in 1923, arriving in his Curtiss JN-4 plane and landing in a field on the west side of the property. In the next two years the barn burned down and C.A. died, and the farm was largely neglected. After Charles Lindbergh became famous in 1927, souvenir seekers frequently broke into the empty house and caused extensive damage.

Encouraged by locals hoping to see the house protected, the Lindbergh family donated the 110-acre (0.45 km2) farm to the state of Minnesota in 1931 as a park in memory of C.A. The family worked with the Minnesota Historical Society to restore the home, and donated many original furnishings. The Works Progress Administration developed the park for recreation. In 1969 the house and its grounds were transferred to the Minnesota Historical Society. In what was to be his final public address, Charles spoke from the porch of his boyhood home at the 1973 grand opening of an adjacent interpretive center. He died the following year. The visitor center initially focused on the three generations of Lindberghs in America, at the request of the spotlight-leery Charles. However, a 2002 remodeling doubled the exhibit space and added more about the aviator himself.

In 1989 the WPA developments were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a 9-acre (3.6 ha) historic district. The district contains six contributing properties—two buildings (a picnic shelter and latrine), two structures (the water tower and a retaining wall along Pike Creek), and two objects (drinking fountains near the picnic shelter). All were built between 1938 and 1939. They are considered historically significant as examples of New Deal federal work relief and Minnesota's state park development, and architecturally significant for their National Park Service rustic design. The same picnic shelter design was used in Lake Bemidji State Park.

Park grounds

The land is glacial till deposited between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago. Slate boulders carried in by glaciers from farther north are visible in the bed of Pike Creek. The vegetation remains similar to its pre-settlement composition of pine forest with oak and prairie openings. Damming has raised the water level of the Mississippi substantially from the days when Charles Lindbergh swam in it.

The park has a campground with 38 sites, 15 of those with electrical hookups. There is also a group campsite that accommodates up to 30 people, one walk-in campsite, and a canoe-in site along the Mississippi River.

National Register of Historic Places - Charles A. Lindbergh House and Park

Statement of Significance:

Congressman Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., and. his aviator son Charles August Lindbergh, Jr., contributed to 20th century America in many ways. Among the foremost of these was their strikingly similar— though differently conceived - opposition to U.S. involvement in the First and Second World Wars. As eminent historian Wayne S. Cole explains, in the years immediately preceding World War II, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., "was not an agrarian progressive as his congressman father had been in the like period of 1914 to 1917, but both men were courageously independent noninterventionists."

In addition, according to his biographer Bruce L. Larson, Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., a congressman from 1907 until 1917, "contributed both to the national development of reform thought and action, and to the tradition of American protest politics. 11 ^ Throughout his highly independent political career—in which, in order, he was a Republican supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, an Insurgent or anti-Taft Republican, a Progressive, a Nonpartisan Leaguer, and a Farmer-Laborite—the older Lindbergh was the., leading congressional ^ critic of the eastern banking establishment or Money Trust* In fact, he was the first Congressman to demand an investigation of the concentration of credit resources in a few eastern banks. When the First World War began in Europe, Lindbergh was convinced, says Larson, "that an 'inner circle 1 composed chiefly, of financial interests, was promoting American intervention." 3 Eventually the Minnesotan published three major books on these topics: Banking and Currency and the Money Trust (1913), Why Is Your Country at War and • What Happens to You After the War (1917), and The Economic Pinch (1923). Declining to seek reelection to the House in 1916, Lindbergh secured the endorsement of the Nonpartisan League, an economically motivated farmer-labor organization, and entered the 1918 Minnesota.

Republican gubernatorial primary. Though he had supported the war following U.S. entry, his opponents, says historian Carol Jenson, made "a classic attempt to use—in the full sense of the word—the loyalty issue" against him.' This election, which Lindbergh lost, ranks among the Nation's most excessive and intolerant applications of the wartime loyalty issue.

In 1927, only a few years after his father's death, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., made history's first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris. Overnight he became the idealized "all-American boy" hero of the entire Nation. Young Lindbergh neither displayed his father's antipathy toward the Money Trust nor developed his interest in politics but having resided in Europe and seen firsthand evidence of German strength in the 1930's, he feared that World War II, if prolonged, would devastate western civilization. Accordingly, he opposed American involvement in the conflict and advocated an early, negotiated peace, Lindbergh became, in the words of historian Wayne S. Cole, "the most praised, the most criticized, and the most maligned noninterventionist in the United States." 5 Like his father before him, though, he supported the war effort following U.S. entry. In 1953 Lindbergh published a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his Transatlantic flight, The Spirit of St. Louis, and in the early 1960's he became a leading advocate of environmental and ecological concerns.

Maintained in its original wooded setting on the western bank of the Mississippi River, this simple, 1^-story frame farmhouse, which sheltered both father and son between 1907 and 1920, is the only extant residence associated with both men. Assisted by Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the Minnesota Historical Society restored the house in 1969-72. The society now maintains the house, an adjacent icehouse, and roughly 17 acres of the original Lindbergh farm. Virtually hidden from view, an interpretive center and parking lot stand within the designated historical area too.