Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Joseph — who was briefly the King of Spain and Naples — settled later in life on a 60-acre estate called Point Breeze, overlooking the Delaware River in Bordentown, New Jersey. The elder Bonaparte lived there from 1816 until 1839. Though much of the former estate is in ruins, the site was transformed into a state park and museum in 2023.

Best known for the 1868 novel “Little Women,” Louisa May Alcott is just one part of the literary legacy of Concord, Massachusetts. Authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne also lived and worked in Concord. Emerson loaned his cabin on Walden Pond to his friend Henry David Thoreau, who wrote “Walden” here. All of these authors are buried in the town’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

The National Comedy Center is located in Jamestown, New York, the hometown of Lucille Ball. While it celebrates the general history of comedy as an art form, the center is also home to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Museum, dedicated to the couple who played the Ricardos on the classic sitcom “I Love Lucy.”

John Muir is America’s most famous naturalist and conservationist. Through his travels, writings, and activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he brought the preservation of wilderness into public consciousness and played an influential role in the creation of several national parks. Located in Martinez, California, is the John Muir National Historic Site, which preserves his Victorian home and several hundred acres of surrounding forest and grasslands.

In the town of Tuscumbia, Alabama, sits an unassuming white, clapboard house where one of the most inspiring figures of the early 20th century was born. Just 19 months after her birth in 1880, Helen Keller was left blind and deaf from illness, but she later became an internationally recognized figure for her work on behalf of blind and deaf people everywhere. The Helen Keller Home has preserved the house and grounds in its original state.

It’s about 1,110 miles north of the “most magical place on Earth,” but Walt Disney was born in a wooden cottage in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood in 1901. Disney’s parents designed and built the cottage, and Walt lived here until he was four years old, later moving to California in his 20s. The home has been a heritage site since 2013.

Acclaimed actress and singer Judy Garland was born in northeast Minnesota, and her childhood home in Grand Rapids is now the Judy Garland Museum and Children's Discovery Museum, which includes a “Land of Oz” exhibit. Each June, the town also hosts an annual festival celebrating Judy Garland’s birthday with music, movies, and the “Dash for the Ruby Slippers” 5K race.

Elvis Presley’s most famous residence was his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, which is now a museum, but the singer’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi is also a historic landmark. It is part of the Mississippi Blues Trail, a series of significant sites related to blues music. Presley’s former two-room house has been furnished to resemble how it looked when the family lived there in the 1930s.

Pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, and her birthplace has been restored and preserved as a museum. In 2023, the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum will also open in Atchison, and it will feature the last remaining Lockheed L-10E, identical to the plane Earhart was flying when she tragically disappeared in 1937.

Before he became known worldwide as John Wayne, Marion Robert Morrison was born in Madison County, Iowa, in 1907. The future movie star lived in a modest home in the town of Winterset, and today the restored home is located next to the John Wayne Birthplace Museum, the world’s only museum dedicated to Wayne. The museum also features a movie theater furnished with seats from the Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

Vincent van Gogh’s series of paintings of sunflowers — a color experiment that he painted with just three shades of yellow — are among the artist’s most well-known works. Although he was born in the Netherlands, he painted them while he was staying in the south of France, in the town of Arles, from 1888 to 1889. The artist said that the works were meant to convey the concept of gratitude.

Arnold Schwarzenegger grew up in the village of Thal, near Austria’s second largest city of Graz. He left in 1966, at the age of 19, to pursue his bodybuilding career, which turned into a hugely successful film career by the 1980s. If you’re a fan of “the Governator,” you can visit the Official Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum in his hometown, the only museum in the world named in his honor.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770 in Bonn, a university city on the banks of the Rhine River in western Germany. Beethoven and his family only lived in the house at Bonngasse 20 for four years, but it is one of few 18th-century homes remaining in Bonn. In 1893 it became a museum dedicated to the legendary composer. In Vienna, Austria, a different Beethoven Museum preserves the apartments where the composer lived and worked later in life.

In his 1985 song, “Paisley Park,” Prince sings the words, “Paisley Park is in your heart,” and two years later, the legendary artist turned what was an imaginary place of peace and love into an actual home and recording studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota, where he lived and worked for 30 years. Since Prince’s death in 2016, Paisley Park has since become a museum.

In the Brookline neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, sits the preserved birthplace of President John F. Kennedy. Although the Kennedys moved from the house in 1920, Kennedy's mother, Rose, bought it back in 1964 and donated photographs, furniture, and more to create a memorial to her son. The National Park Service established a National Historic Site at the property in 1969.

Author Ernest Hemingway allegedly once referred to his hometown as “a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds.” Despite the disparaging quote (the authenticity of which has not been verified), the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, has embraced its connection to Hemingway. Visitors can tour the author’s birthplace, which has been restored to the condition it was when he was born in 1899.

In one of his most famous songs, “New York, New York,” legendary crooner Frank Sinatra sings how if he can make it there, he can make it anywhere. Sinatra would know: He was born just across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 12, 1915. Today, Sinatra fans can take a self-guided walking tour in Hoboken and nearby Manhattan, which visits his childhood homes, his favorite bars, and the studios where he recorded.

In 1734, Augustine Washington built a modest four-room house in Virginia. After his death in 1743, his son George Washington, one of the Founding Fathers and the first President of the United States, inherited it. Washington oversaw a number of renovations, expanding the house to an impressive 21 rooms. Today, Mount Vernon is one of the most visited homes in the U.S.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Missouri, commemorates the life of Samuel Clemens, one of America's most beloved authors. The properties on the Mississippi River in Hannibal not only include the historic Clemens home, but also the homes of the real-life people who inspired such characters as Huckleberry Finn and Becky Thatcher.

In 1986, country music legend Dolly Parton took over an amusement park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and rebranded it Dollywood. After expanding it with more rides and themed attractions, Dollywood is now the most popular ticketed tourist attraction in Tennessee. It includes a replica of the childhood home Parton shared with her 10 siblings. Parton’s actual “Tennessee Mountain Home” is in a remote area of the nearby Great Smoky Mountains.