West Branch, Iowa, Hoover's Birthplace

West Branch, Iowa is the birthplace of the thirty-first president of the United States. Herbert Hoover was born on August tenth, eighteen seventy-four, in a two-room cottage on Downey Street, the son of a blacksmith and a Quaker seamstress. He lived here until he was eleven, orphaned by age nine, before leaving to live with an uncle in Oregon, but this small Cedar County town held him close.

In nineteen sixty-two, a presidential library and museum opened here. In nineteen sixty-five, the federal government established the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, which has since grown to roughly one hundred and eighty-six acres, including a restored stretch of tallgrass prairie. Hoover and his wife Lou are both buried on a gentle knoll overlooking the same cottage where he was born.