This dissertation traces the development of two brothers—from children through established professional adulthood to retirement—in order to establish what aspects of their lives and character motivated them to collect objects over their lifetimes and then resolve, in their retirement, to transform their hobby into a public museum. While there are well-known examples of wealthy Americans who built museums, rural middle-class Americans, such as the Landis brothers, generally did not.

Brothers Henry and George Landis, born respectively in 1865 and 1867 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, collected the same kinds of things that other boys growing up in the late nineteenth century also accumulated, but dedication to their leisure pursuits led, many decades later, to an unusual result. Their collecting tastes evolved as they matured, and unlike other men of their class and rural background, they clung to their hobbies, retired relatively early, and intensified their collecting. After founding a private museum and library in their home village of Landis Valley in 1925, their persistence in securing a permanent steward for their accumulation of nearly 100,000 three-dimensional objects and nearly 250,000 books resulted in 1953 with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s acquisition and subsequent improvement of their “Landis Valley Museum” as a public facility.

As regards the brothers’ personal development, a more typical pattern for a man in their Pennsylvania German region and era involved taking a country school education, acquiring a mate to begin producing a brood of offspring, and settling into a routine of farming or working at an agriculture-related job. The Landis brothers’ inclinations, however, were otherwise, and their parents tolerated and indulged their intellectual curiosity. Like other American boys in the late nineteenth century, the brothers initially fancied engineering careers that emulated the paths of the best-known industrialists and inventors of their day—men who were agents and leaders of rapid technological change. However, their family dynamics, their experiences, and their developing characters encouraged them to choose paths that were not typical. How and why did those factors affect their choices?