Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum

In July 1897, famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart was born here, at the Gothic Revival cottage belonging to her mother’s parents.

The home was built in 1861 and was expanded by Earhart’s grandparents, with whom she spent much of her young life while her father traveled. It was named to the National Register of Historic Buildings in 1971, but remained a private home until 1984. Today it is maintained as a museum by the Ninety-Nines, a group of women pilots of which Earhart was the first president. It has been restored to its original turn-of-the-last-century condition, and contains many personal items belonging to Earhart’s family, as well as artifacts and displays related to the doomed pilot’s career and mysterious end.

Amelia Earhart famously set off on an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, and disappeared somewhere over the South Pacific. It is thought that she crash landed into the waters off the remote Nikumaroro Island. Nearby on Howlard Island, a lighthouse tower named after her stands in perpetual wait for her re-fueling stopover.

As part of her hometown’s celebrations of its association with the flier, there is also an enormous earthworks portrait of Earhart on a nearby hillside.