Field of Dreams Movie Site

Originally built for the movie of the same name, the Field of Dreams is a baseball field that draws quite a lot of tourists who might not otherwise find themselves in Dubuque County, Iowa.

It’s one of the most well-known pop-culture tourist attractions to be built for a Hollywood project. The studio responsible for the movie built the baseball diamond on two farms just a few miles outside of Dyersville. When production wrapped, the studio left the diamond behind and the Lansing family, which owned the property on which most of the field sat, left it intact. The Ameskamp family, which owned the other slice of land (the studio combined two plots in order to get uninhibited sunset shots for the film), ripped up part of the field to return the land to farming. But they thought better of it the next year and decided to restore the field.

Keith Rahe, another resident of the area, put together a baseball team that would perform on the weekends to entertain the crowds that started gathering after the movie took off at the box office. Every Sunday afternoon, the team would play for thousands.

In 2007, the Ameskamp family sold their portion of the land to the Lansing family, which now controls the entire properly. But the future of the field is uncertain. The failing economy in 2009 meant that the annual charity events held at the field had to be canceled (the Lansing family donated thousands even without the event to subsidize their giving). And in 2010, the Lansing family expressed an interest in selling the property. In 2019, Major League Baseball announced that it will build an 8,000-seat stadium at the iconic site to host an August 13, 2020 game between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees.