How Dyersville earned the score

Situation: the set the studio left behind

Three miles northeast of Dyersville, a white farmhouse looks down a gravel lane at a baseball diamond that simply stops where the corn begins. A Universal Pictures crew built it in 1988 on Don Lansing’s farm, land his family had worked since 1906, for an adaptation of W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe. The studio paid Lansing a 10,000 dollar location fee, added a picket fence, a longer porch, and two bay windows, and sweated through a drought so severe the corn stood two feet tall when the script needed it over a ballplayer’s head, according to the AFI Catalog’s production history. Field of Dreams opened on April 21, 1989, earned three Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and handed American sports its most quoted instruction: “If you build it, he will come.”

Then the trucks left, and Dyersville got to find out what the line meant in practice. The field sat on two properties: the diamond, the bleachers, and the house on the Lansing farm, with left and center field on Al and Rita Ameskamp’s land next door, per the site’s recorded history. Nobody in town had commissioned a landmark. Dyersville already had two identities it had built on purpose. It is the Farm Toy Capital of the World, home of the Ertl Company since 1959 and of the National Farm Toy Museum, opened in 1986 by the industry it hosts. And its skyline is the twin 212 foot spires of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, elevated by Pope Pius XII in 1956 and one of the few minor basilicas in rural America. The third identity showed up uninvited, in a hay meadow, wearing flannel.

Within weeks of the release, cars began easing up Lansing Road. Visitors walked the base paths, sat in the little bleachers, brought their own gloves. Don Lansing mowed the field and let them, no gate, no ticket booth, no admission charge. It would stay that way for more than twenty years.

Task: turn an accident into an economy

A movie set is not a strategy. Sets get struck, and farmland gets planted. For the town nearest the most famous ballfield in cinema, the assignment had three parts.

Keep it real

The site’s entire value was that it was the actual place. Pave it, gate it, or theme it and the spell breaks. The field had to remain a farm field a family would recognize, free to walk.

Give visitors a show

A photograph takes ten minutes. A visitor economy needs a reason to stay for lunch, then for the night. The set needed programming.

Survive its owners

Farms change hands. An icon on private land needed owners, again and again, who would not cash it out into rides and condos.

Action: mow it, staff it, then let the majors in

The first stewards were the families themselves. The Lansings kept their portion intact and added a small souvenir stand. The Ameskamps plowed their share back into corn for a season, then restored it when the visitors kept coming and opened a souvenir stand of their own, per the site’s history. For a while the most famous outfield in film ran across two farms with two gift shacks and one honor system. In August 2007 Rita Ameskamp sold her piece to Don and Becky Lansing, and the field became whole under one deed.

The show arrived in 1990. Keith Rahe, a farmer from up the road, organized a team called the Ghost Players, who would materialize out of the stalks in vintage flannels on Sunday afternoons, run drills, clown, and play catch with whoever was standing on the grass. The act drew thousands on its best days, toured overseas for the military, and gave the site the one thing a static set lacks: a recurring reason to come back. Rahe went on to lead Travel Dubuque, the regional tourism bureau. The man who used to climb out of the corn now runs the marketing.

Professional ownership came in stages. On December 28, 2012, Go the Distance Baseball, a partnership led by Denise Stillman, bought the 193 acre property for 3.4 million dollars and pitched a 24 field youth tournament complex called All-Star Ballpark Heaven, a plan whose price climbed from 38 million dollars toward 70 million and drew a rezoning fight with neighboring farmers before it was scaled back, per the ownership record. The oversized dream stalled. The field did not. Under the new owners, annual visitation climbed from about 65,000 toward 100,000, and in 2019, the year Major League Baseball announced it was coming, site staff counted a record 150,000 visitors, per industry coverage of the game’s buildup.

Result: one night for television, a longer season for the town

On August 12, 2021, Major League Baseball played a regular season game in an 8,000 seat ballpark raised in the corn a short walk from the movie diamond, the two connected by a cut path through the stalks. Kevin Costner led the teams out of the rows before first pitch. Chicago shortstop Tim Anderson ended it 9 to 8 with a two run homer into the corn. Fox averaged 5.9 million viewers, the network’s best regular season number in years and its most streamed regular season game ever, and by any network’s measure the most watched regular season game since 2005.

The town of 4,477 hosted roughly 20,000 visitors that week, worth an estimated 6 million dollars to the area economy, per KWQC’s reporting on the game’s local impact, and hotel phones rang for 30 miles around. MLB came back on August 11, 2022, and the Cubs beat the Reds 4 to 2 before a sellout crowd of 7,823.

Ownership kept maturing toward the town. In September 2021, This is Heaven LLC, a venture led by Hall of Famer Frank Thomas with developer Rick Heidner, took a controlling interest in Go the Distance and floated an 80 million dollar buildout of youth fields, a hotel, and an RV park, per the site’s ownership history. In late 2024 the property changed hands again, this time to Dyersville Events, a hometown nonprofit, for 27 million dollars with help from a state grant. And in May 2026 the finishing money arrived: a 10 million dollar gift from Andy and Debi Butler, Craig and Lisa Breitbach, and the McCoy Group to complete a permanent 4,000 seat ballpark, expandable for the big nights, per Ballpark Digest.

The permanent park opened its first season this summer. Iowa high school teams inaugurated it in June 2026, the Northwoods League brought its Home Run Challenge and All-Star Game to Dyersville in July, and a new Northwoods League summer collegiate team takes up residence in 2027. On August 13, 2026, the Twins host the Phillies in the third MLB at Field of Dreams game, the first streamed live on Netflix. Walking the original movie field is still free, per the site’s visitor pages.

The visitor who makes the drive gets a town, not just a diamond. Downtown, the If You Build It Exhibit keeps the film’s production story, a Ghost Player mural, and a 1919 World Series ball on display through October. The National Farm Toy Museum shows some 30,000 scale models and draws more than 30,000 visitors a year, with the Summer Farm Toy Show each June and the National Farm Toy Show each November filling the calendar’s other end. The basilica stands open to anyone who looks up, Textile Brewing Company pours in a converted 1910 sewing factory, and the Plaza Antique Mall stacks 250 booths of the rural Midwest’s attic, per Travel Iowa’s Dyersville guide. That is the shape of a real itinerary, and the reason the card below grades the anchor well ahead of the town that holds it.

Takeaway: inherit like you built it

Dyersville did not choose its icon, but nearly every decision since 1989 reads like a town that had. It kept the field authentic and free while the audience found it. It added programming before it added infrastructure: ghosts first, grandstands later. It let ownership consolidate one rung at a time, family to entrepreneur to Hall of Famer to hometown nonprofit, each step adding capacity without surrendering the thing itself. Thirty seven years separate the 10,000 dollar location fee from the Netflix broadcast, and patience is the through line. The movie promised that if you build it, he will come. The town’s actual discovery is sturdier: if they keep coming, build it slowly.

The comparison Creative City Developments keeps reaching for is Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, which commissioned its icon on purpose with Thomas Dambo’s trolls. Dyersville had its icon handed over by a location scout. Different origins, same discipline: protect the asset, program the calendar, and keep the ownership close to home. The open work is visible on the card. The anchor grades B+ while the town side categories sit far below it, because the field is three miles from the storefronts and the connective tissue is thin: beds near the corn, reasons to walk 1st Avenue after the ninth inning, one brand voice across the site, the city, and the chamber. Build that, and they will stay.