Over the centuries, man has devised many ways to open the nutshell to capture the delicious morsel inside. There is no other tool that has been made in so many different designs and with such a variety of materials as the nutcracker.

Enter through the door, and you are amazed at the vast amount of nutcrackers being shown! Every where you look you will see NUTCRACKERS...different styles of wooden toy soldier nutcrackers, the name used for the colorful German figures of Steinbach, Ulbricht, and the Erzgebirge makers. You will see the Betel cutters from Asia, the beautifully carved wooden figurals from Europe, the precious ivory and porcelains, the silver that matched the Victorian tableware, or the conventional utility type strong enough to conquer the black walnuts. You will find hand-held metal nutcrackers in beautiful designs as well as those more crudely crafted in blacksmith shops. You will see beautifully carved ebony and boxwoodVisitors trying to crack nuts with various nutcrackers! figures, so durable they have withstood hundreds of years. And nutting bowls...artifacts found in the southeastern United States and Europe which date back thousands of years.

There are different ways to crack a nut...direct pressure, indirect pressure, screw, and percussion, and you will find them all in the Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum. The creativity of man is vividly portrayed in the many ways he used to crack a nut.

You will be amazed at the many different ways that a nut can be cracked!