Preserving History: Creating Your Town with Lego Blocks

Mr. Local History has a fun way to preserve and promote local history with a social project – build your own historic LEGO town!

What better way for a community to come together as everyone works to build a recreation of your historic downtown. This is such a great social experiment in having children and parents working together for a common goal to build a lasting memory of the history of your hometown.

The project typically will take a year from startup to completion based on the number of volunteers willing to put in their time. The plan is the first and most important phase of the project as you have to map out the parts of the town you want to include in the village. That’s a fun part of the project as you should determine first what gets into your village.

Below are just a few of the common subject areas to focus on with your village project:

Find and select a Project Architect Lead (being an architect helps).
Gather photos of the buildings in the area.
Determine scale and where you want to create and build your village.
Lay out your town area (typically a map with the property areas laid out along the street
Get lots of volunteers
Build slowly/ build modular. Get one building done first to align scale to the rest of the buildings.
Create building teams that own each structure. Share weekly progress.
Learn and improve

Building Block Projects That Inspires

Take a look at what people have created with these tiny building blocks. Between the videos, we did find a fantastic project right here in New Jersey at the Montclair History Center. They’ve embarked on a major building block project to recreate their historic village with LEGOs alongside a small army of volunteers. We can’t wait to watch the progress and wish them luck.