Margaret Woodbury Strong
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Margaret Woodbury Strong (1897-1969) loved to play and found serious fun in collecting artifacts of play. Intelligent, intuitive, and competitive, she played at travel, archery, golf, bowling, gardening, and flower arranging and assembled an extraordinary assortment of objects that illuminate the American experience through the window of play. To share her keen interest, in 1968 she founded a museum that would use her collections to fascinate, educate, and entertain.
An only child of prosperous parents who traveled widely in the United States and around the world, young Margaret developed a lively imagination and an intense curiosity. She recorded her experiences in diaries, scrapbooks, and sketches. She also took up photography, received tutoring in languages, history, music, and art, and collected souvenirs. As this childhood hobby became a grown-up passion, Margaret Woodbury Strong left her mark on history.
She died in 1969 and left her considerable estate to help support the museum. Fourteen years later, the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum opened in a new, 156,000-square-foot building on 13 acres in downtown Rochester, New York. In 2006 the museum became the Strong National Museum of Play and nearly doubled its physical plant, to 282,000 square feet. This made it the second-largest children’s museum in the United States and one of the nation’s largest history museums.
