East Aurora's Best Things To Do For Summer 2024

Fisher Price Toys, a president’s hand-built home, the Wizard of Oz, Tiffany-stained glass and an original five and dime magnate?!? For a small village, East Aurora has an incredible amount of fascinating history and attractions. Whether you’re making it a stay-cation in late summer or coming here for the first time, these are just some of the things to see and do. Besides shopping at Vidler’s, of course!  Click on the links for information about tours and hours.

And you can start your tour right from our front doors and work your way down Main Street.

Almost everybody knows that Fisher Price Toys was founded and still retains its headquarters in East Aurora. Partners Herman Fisher, Irving Price and Helen Schelle opened their new toy manufacturing business just 6 months after we opened our store in 1930. But did you know their original site was on Church Street, just behind our store? They remained there for 20 years before moving to larger quarters at their now longtime location on Girard Ave.  

Just across Main Street from the front of our store was the original home of Millard Fillmore, 13^th president of the U.S. Fillmore built it himself and practiced law in East Aurora prior to beginning his political life. And he could walk across Main St. to his office -- located where one of our buildings is now. So how are Fisher Price and Fillmore connected? By the 1930s the Fillmore house had fallen into a state of disrepair, and Irving Price bought and moved the house to its current location. He oversaw its restoration for use as a home and artist's studio for his wife, Margaret. Acquired by the Aurora Historical Society in 1975, and restored in appearance to the period of Fillmore's ownership, the Fillmore Presidential House is a National Historic Landmark and the only remaining house in the U.S that was built by a U.S. President.  

Stroll down Main Street 4 blocks and you’ll come to the Roycroft Campus. And that’s where you can see a direct Wizard of Oz connection to East Aurora. Why E.A. you may ask? W.W. Denslow, the illustrator for the original and classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, was a Roycrofter and worked for Elbert Hubbard creating posters, cartoons and pictures for several of his publications. If you stand on the corner of Main Street and South Grove, look up at the peak of the Roycroft Chapel building. You'll see Denslow’s “North Wind”, bas-relief which looks suspiciously like Dorothy’s Cowardly Lion. Or should we say, the Cowardly Lion looks suspiciously like the Roycroft North Wind... Denslow was a Roycrofter before he did the Oz illustrations!

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Leave the Campus and walk a few more blocks down Main St. and you’ll come to Baker Memorial Methodist Church. What sets it apart from other historic stone churches? There are the 17 original Tiffany-stained glass windows in the sanctuary, made under the direct supervision of Louis Comfort Tiffany himself in the 1920s. Just a short walk across Main Street from the church is the aforementioned Fillmore home.  

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You might want to drive, but from the church/Fillmore house continue just a short distance down Main and veer right at our traffic ‘circle.’ Barely a mile outside of town is Knox Farm State Park – originally the summer estate of the prestigious Knox family of Buffalo. And now we’ve come full circle… the Knox family’s original fortune came from, you guessed it, 5 & 10 stores! Seymour Knox I had a very successful chain of his own stores before merging with his cousin, Frank Woolworth and becoming part of the Woolworth empire. Frank Woolworth was the grandaddy of the ‘five and ten’ model – but that’s another story!  

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