Jesse and Hulda Hoover

This spot in West Branch remembers Jesse and Hulda Hoover, the parents of the thirty first president of the United States. They lived in this small Quaker community in eastern Iowa, where Jesse worked as a blacksmith and Hulda was a seamstress and an active member of the Society of Friends. On August tenth, eighteen seventy four, in a tiny two room cottage built just three years earlier beside Jesse's blacksmith shop, Hulda gave birth to a baby boy named Herbert Clark Hoover.

Jesse himself had come from Ohio, and Hulda had grown up in Norwich, Ontario, before they settled in this devout farming town. Both died young, leaving Herbert orphaned as a boy. That birth cottage still stands nearby, the heart of the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, a humble beginning for a man who would lead the nation.