America's wackiest museums

Matchstick Marvels Tourist Center
Gladbrook, Iowa

See Genuine Works of Art

Give a guy a box of matches, and you never know what he will do. Some might create a flame. Patrick Acton of Gladbrook, Iowa will create Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, down to the minutest detail. In fact, his scale model, eight-foot-long replica of Notre Dame debuted at the Matchstick Marvels Tourist Center in early April, 2012, where it will remain on permanent display.

While Notre Dame is the largest, and perhaps the most ambitious of Acton’s incredibly detailed “facsimiles,” (it’s made from some 400,000 matchsticks), visitors to Matchstick Marvels can also view 16 more of his creations. There is the 12-foot-long scale model of the United States Capitol; an enormous replica of the space shuttle Challenger, complete with launch tower; and a 13-foot-long model of the U.S.S. Iowa. Others include the Wright Brother’s Flyer, a dinosaur, a Victorian mansion, the famous clipper ship Cutty Sark, a crazy-looking crooked house, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz, and seven more.  

Creating these works has involved cutting the heads off, and gluing, more than three million ordinary two-inch-long wooden matchsticks. Finally, Acton wised up and asked the match company to sell him headless matches. They said yes.

The Facts: Matchstick Marvels Tourist Center is at 319-2 Street in Gladbrook, Iowa. It is open daily from April 1 through November 30, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $3.00 for adults, $1.00 for children five to 12, and free for children under five.