Over 100 million sets have been sold worldwide, and Lincoln Logs were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1999. Some scholars also believe John Lloyd Wright as a child possibly played with the Log Cabin Playhouse, a similar wooden construction set that had been developed by toy company Ellis, Britton & Eaton in the 1860s.Ī century after their creation, low-tech Lincoln Logs continue to be popular in a high-tech world. Lincoln Logs followed the trail blazed by Tinkertoys and Erector Sets, which had been introduced a few years earlier. The toy’s packaging featured a simple drawing of a log cabin, a small portrait of Lincoln and the slogan “Interesting playthings typifying the spirit of America.” Capitalizing on both a nostalgia for the frontier at a time when the United States was becoming increasingly urbanized and a wave of patriotism in the wake of World War I, Lincoln Logs became an instant success. The toy came with instructions to build not only Abraham Lincoln’s Kentucky boyhood home, but a famous log structure from the pages of American literature, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Follow him on Twitter at on Facebook.In 1918, John Lloyd Wright began to market his creation through his own firm, the Red Square Toy Company, and two years later he received a patent for his “toy-cabin construction.” He bestowed upon his creation an alliterative name that also evoked an American icon-Lincoln Logs.
#Lincoln logs series#
His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. The Modernist Gas Stations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der RoheĪ is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Timesīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. For “America’s national toy,” structural endurance and cultural endurance have gone together.ġ2 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Offer Virtual Tours: Hollyhock House, Taliesin West, Fallingwater & Moreįrank Lloyd Wright Creates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspiring Artist Needsįrank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Creativity, Nature and Religion in Rare 1957 Audio In the century since, Lincoln Logs have survived wartime material rationing, the rise and fall of countless toy trends, the buying and selling of parent companies, a brief and unappealing late-60s attempt to make them out of plastic, and even the Imperial Hotel itself.
Named after the sixteenth president of the United States and the log cabin in which he’d grown up, the product tapped into American frontier nostalgia even at its debut. By that time, the younger Wright had already acted on his inspiration to invent the similarly interlocking Lincoln Logs (see patent drawing above), which quickly proved a hit on the market. John Lloyd Wright took note of the interlocking timber beams used to make the structure “earthquake-proof” - a design later tested by 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake, which left most of the city destroyed but the Imperial Hotel standing.
The special fascination for these blocks exhibited by Wright’s second son John Lloyd Wright hinted at a conflict of interests to come: though John “began to feel that spirit of being an architect” in the playroom, says toy historian Steven Sommers, “there was always a tension between his father, who was an architect, and his love for building toys that he’d begun to learn in that Froebel system of early childhood education.” The two intersected when Wright fils assisted Wright père on one of the latter’s most famous works, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Its stock of innovative toys included “geometric building blocks developed by Friedrich Froebel, the German educator who came up with the concept of kindergarten.” When Wright designed his own family home in Oak Park, Illinois, he included a custom playroom for his six children.
#Lincoln logs full#
This enduring toy’s full origin story is told in the Decades TV video above. I just knew, as many kids did before me and many do still today, that they were fun to stack up into cabins, or at least cabin-like shapes. I certainly had no idea that they’d been invented by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright - nor, indeed, did I have any idea who Frank Lloyd Wright was. I myself have fond memories of playing with Lincoln Logs, which, with about 70 years of history already behind them, were a venerable playtime institution, not that I knew it at the time. How many architectural careers have been kindled by Lincoln Logs? Since their invention in the mid-1910s, these deceptively simple wooden building blocks have entertained generations of children, whichever profession they entered upon growing up.
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