As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s April 2008 issue.

With nearly one million sets sold each year, Lincoln Logs have remarkable staying power. For a toy that has hardly changed in almost a century, its lasting appeal is all the more extraordinary.

Invented by John Lloyd Wright, Lincoln Logs rolled onto the scene in 1916. Allegedly inspired by the innovative earthquake resistant design used in the foundation of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo—which was designed by John’s father, Frank Lloyd Wright, and featured a seismically strategic mesh of interlocking beams—the all-wood Lincoln Logs link together with the help of small notches.

The rectilinear sets compel kids to build broadly horizontal, cabin-like structures, more akin to rustic forest redoubts than to modern high-rise housing, which was their inventor’s intent: Taking cues from his father’s own architectural attitude, John Lloyd Wright infused his toys with a sense of simplicity in both material and construction. Lincoln Logs elevate detail and quality of joinery over flashy facades and abstract theories.

Since day one, they have been marketed with an air of nostalgia, as a way to look back on the national narrative of spreading into frontier territory, building forts, and expanding settlements. A politically incorrect—and unintentionally hilarious—ad for Lincoln Logs published in 1934 states the following: “You all know the stories people tell about the pioneers who settled our country. How they cleared land, built log cabins, and fought the Indians....Today we don’t have to do the things the pioneers did, but you boys and girls can build the same sort of little houses, barns, forts, and villages that the pioneers did if you use Lincoln Logs.” The sets even came with “little figures of Indians, cowboys, soldiers, and trappers, and a set of animals for a farmyard.”

Though the sets still come with frontier-themed figures (the “Indians” are now referred to as “Native Americans” and they cost 75 cents each), and “nostalgia” is actually the first button you see on the Lincoln Logs website, these toys do lend themselves to modern design. Intricate cantilevers and Peter Eisenman-inspired grids are only a large-enough toy set away.

Lincoln Logs also lead one to wonder what kids might create with a set designed by, say, Zaha Hadid. Might kids raised playing with toys designed by architects one day be more likely to become architects themselves? Lincoln Logs show that the tactile allure of structural design starts early— and that appeal never quite fades.

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

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