American Made Toys
American made toys got harder to find starting in the late 1990s, when most of the wooden toy category and nearly all molded plastic toys shifted to Chinese manufacturing. Eleven brands below never made that move, or in a couple of cases moved back. For toddler-specific gear, see our American Made Baby Products page too. We verified each brand's manufacturing location through factory disclosures and manufacturer statements. See our full verification methodology for how we research and confirm every brand on this site. If you want to see more toys made mostly in Europe (but not China), see our companion site’s Toys Not Made in China.
| Brand | Type | Made In | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uncle Goose | Wooden blocks | Grand Rapids, MI | Hand-made alphabet blocks |
| Maple Landmark | Wooden toys | Middlebury, VT | Personalized letter trains |
| Lincoln Logs | Building sets | Burnham, ME* | Classic building toy |
| Little Tikes | Ride-ons | Hudson, OH* | Cozy Coupe and ride-on toys |
| Step2 | Playsets, ride-ons | Streetsboro/Perrysville, OH | Play kitchens and playhouses |
| American Plastic Toys | Plastic toys | Walled Lake, MI | Sand pails, wagons, play kitchens |
| Guillow's | Model airplanes | Wakefield, MA | Balsa wood model airplanes |
| Crazy Aaron's | Putty | Norristown, PA | Thinking Putty fidget toys |
| Slinky | Classic toys | Hollidaysburg, PA | The original coiled-spring toy |
| Crayola | Crayons | Easton, PA* | The classic crayon box |
| Wildflower Toys | Handmade dolls | Northern California | Handmade fairy and dollhouse dolls |
*See individual entries below for line-specific details.
American Made Wooden Toys
1. 🇺🇸 Uncle Goose
Before Uncle Goose existed, William Bultman was a burned-out Amway employee who quit his corporate job and started tinkering with wood. His first product wasn't a block at all - it was an oak coaster wagon, launched straight into a recession, which flopped. While regrouping, he discovered something odd: nobody in the country was still making the classic inch-and-three-quarter alphabet block anymore. That gap became the real business, starting out of the family garage in 1983 with his sons helping him hand-cut letters. Pete Bultman now runs the company his father started, working alongside creative director Sarah Crookston.
The catalog has grown well past the original ABC set into more than 70 block styles, bilingual sets, holiday designs, science themes, plus newer non-block products like wooden push toys and an educational line called CHIPS. The wood is still Michigan basswood left uncoated, the ink still gets sent out for third-party testing rather than checked in-house, and the wagon wheels on sets that include one still get turned on a lathe in Maine.
Best for: hand-made alphabet blocks, a genuine last-of-its-kind domestic maker
Recommended:
2. 🇺🇸 Maple Landmark
Maple Landmark didn't start in Middlebury at all. Mike Rainville began tinkering with scrap wood from his grandfather's carpentry projects in his parents' basement in nearby Lincoln, Vermont, turning out spool holders and cribbage boards as a kid. At 15, a traveling salesman noticed his tic-tac-toe boards for sale at the Lincoln General Store, and that became his first wholesale account in 1979. Only after graduating Clarkson University in 1984 did Rainville go full-time, and the operation didn't move into its current Middlebury building until 1996.
The business has stayed a genuine family operation: Rainville's wife Jill and sons Adam and Andrew all work there, and his mother Pat, hired in 1989 after his parents sold their general store, still supervises the finish room most mornings at 6am. The name itself honors his grandparents' maple sugaring farm, Maple Landmark Homestead. Along the way the company acquired two other struggling Vermont toy makers, Troll's Toy Workshop and Montgomery Schoolhouse, folding their product lines rather than letting the names disappear. NameTrains, the personalized wooden letter-car sets, has been the flagship product since the early 1990s, and the newer Schoolhouse Naturals line launched in 2008 as a direct response to that era's wave of overseas toy recalls.
Best for: personalized wooden letter trains and early-learning toys
Recommended:
3. 🇺🇸 Lincoln Logs
Lincoln Logs spent nearly 60 years made in China before K'NEX brought production of the wooden pieces back to the US in 2015, contracting with Pride Manufacturing, a Maine wood-products company that had been making golf tees and cigar tips in Burnham since 1930. The toy itself dates back to 1916, designed by John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and named for the president whose log-cabin origins it evokes.
Best for: a century-old classic, now mostly made in the state it comes from
Recommended:
American Made Ride-On Toys and Playsets
4. 🇺🇸 Little Tikes
Little Tikes has run its rotational-molding plant in Hudson since the company's founding in 1969, and the Cozy Coupe, the red-and-yellow toy car that's outsold actual cars like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord in individual sales years, has come off that same production line since 1979. Little Tikes pioneered rotational molding for children's products, and the Hudson campus is still the largest rotational molding plant in the world by the company's own account.
Best for: the Cozy Coupe and ride-on toys, made at the same Ohio plant since 1979
Recommended:
5. 🇺🇸 Step2
Step2 was founded in 1991 by Thomas Murdough, the same person who founded Little Tikes decades earlier and left after selling that company. He built Step2 on the same rotational-molding approach and the same Ohio roots, and it's since grown into the largest American manufacturer of preschool and toddler toys, running two plants in northern Ohio. The catalog covers play kitchens, water tables, playhouses, climbers, swing sets, and ride-on toys.
Best for: play kitchens, water tables, and outdoor playsets from the largest domestic toy manufacturer in the category
Recommended:
6. 🇺🇸 American Plastic Toys
American Plastic Toys has made toys in Walled Lake since 1962 and has an explicit, on-record pledge to never offshore to China, a promise it's kept even as most of the toy industry moved production overseas in the 1980s. The company sources its plastic and colorant domestically, and less than 4% of its toy value content is imported, mostly small components like sound modules and fasteners.
The catalog runs over 125 items: sand pails, play kitchens, wagons, toy strollers, dollhouses, and ride-on cars and trucks, all priced from about $2 to $100.
Best for: affordable, genuinely all-domestic plastic toys with a decades-long no-offshoring pledge
Check prices at American Plastic ToysAmerican Made Classic Toys
7. 🇺🇸 Guillow's
Paul K. Guillow started what became Guillow's in 1926 after returning from World War I with an interest in aviation, and the company has run out of the same Wakefield facility since 1933. It makes balsa wood model aircraft kits, from simple rubber-band-powered gliders to detailed stick-and-tissue scale models of WWI and WWII fighters, still assembled by hand from laser-cut balsa sheets rather than injection-molded plastic.
The company's own president has been with Guillow's for 50 years and points out plainly that there aren't many toys left that are actually made in the US and playable by anyone from age 3 to 90.
Best for: balsa wood model airplanes, a near-century-old domestic hobby brand
Recommended:
8. 🇺🇸 Crazy Aaron's
Aaron Muderick started making Thinking Putty by hand in 1998 after experimenting with the material as a hobby; the company now runs a dedicated manufacturing plant in Norristown that's handled everything in-house since 2018. Every tin, whether it's the color-shifting Hypercolor line, the magnetic putty, or the glow-in-the-dark varieties, is made at that one facility.
Crazy Aaron's works with several Philadelphia-area vocational centers to employ people with intellectual and physical disabilities as part of its manufacturing operation, which is folded directly into how the company describes its production process rather than treated as a side initiative.
Best for: Thinking Putty and fidget toys, hand-crafted at one Pennsylvania facility
Recommended:
9. 🇺🇸 Slinky
Richard James accidentally invented the Slinky in 1943 while working at a Philadelphia shipyard, and production has run out of Hollidaysburg since the mid-1960s, on machines James built himself in 1945 that are, remarkably, still the ones in use today. The plant turns out about 3 million Slinkys a year using steel wire sourced from York, Pennsylvania, less than 100 miles away.
The factory briefly went dark in 2020 when a prior owner shut it down, but Just Play acquired the brand and reopened Hollidaysburg the same year, rehiring the original production team and keeping manufacturing in the US rather than moving it overseas.
Best for: the original coiled-spring toy, made on the same machines since 1945
Recommended:
10. 🇺🇸 Crayola
Crayola has made crayons in Easton since 1903, when Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith's company sold its first box of eight for a nickel. The Easton plant still produces every standard box sold in the US, the 8, 24, and 64-count boxes stocked in nearly every American classroom, turning out around 12 million crayons a day. Hallmark bought the company in 1984, but manufacturing stayed in Pennsylvania even as most of the crayon industry moved overseas.
Best for: the classic crayon box, still made where it's been made for over a century
Recommended:
American Made Handmade Dolls
11. 🇺🇸 Wildflower Toys
Wildflower Toys is a family business run by owner Suzanne Barker out of Northern California since 2013, making fairy dolls, dollhouse families, Waldorf-style gnomes, and wooden peg dolls entirely by hand. Each doll starts with a wire frame wrapped in cotton yarn for a posable body, topped with a wooden head, and the company also sells felt craft kits and sewing kits that let kids assemble their own bendy dolls.
Everything ships from the family's own workshop, with no outside manufacturer in the chain. It's a small-scale operation by design, more artisan maker than mass producer, which is part of what keeps the whole process genuinely domestic.
Best for: handmade fairy and dollhouse dolls from a small family workshop
Check prices at Wildflower ToysAmerican Made Toys FAQ
How many toys sold in the US are made in China?
Roughly 80 percent, according to The Toy Association. US International Trade Commission data showed 78.3 percent of toy imports in 2024 came from China, which is why the brands on this page are the exception rather than the rule.
Do imported toys have to meet the same safety standards?
Yes. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 made the ASTM F963 toy safety standard mandatory, and toys for kids 12 and under must be tested at a CPSC-accepted lab and certified by the US manufacturer or importer. Those rules apply whether a toy comes from Pennsylvania or overseas.
Are American made toys lead-free?
Every children's toy sold in the US, wherever it's made, is limited to 100 parts per million of lead in its accessible parts and 90 parts per million in paint or surface coatings. A US factory doesn't change those limits, so "Made in USA" is a sourcing claim, not a separate lead standard.
How can I tell where a toy was made?
Look for the tracking label. Toys for kids 12 and under must carry permanent marks on the product and its packaging that identify the manufacturer and the location and date of production. Some companies put the location in code, so check the "Made in" marking on the box too.
Related: American Made Baby Products - car seats, cloth diapers, and feeding gear built in the USA
Manufacturing verified through manufacturer disclosures, official brand websites, and factory statements. Last verified: October 2026.
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. This site also participates in other affiliate partnerships, so if you buy through a link here, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Verification is independent of any commission: a brand that doesn't meet our standard doesn't appear here regardless of what an affiliate program might pay.