Herbert Hoover Presidential Library

Herbert Hoover's library sits in West Branch, Iowa, the small Quaker town where he was born in a two-room cottage that still stands a short walk away. Dedicated in 1962 on his eighty-eighth birthday, with the former president himself present, it is the westernmost of the early libraries and the only one in the Midwest heartland, set within a national historic site that preserves Hoover's birthplace, a meetinghouse, and his grave.

Though Hoover left office in 1933, his library came after Roosevelt's and Truman's because the system that made it possible did not yet exist when he was president. Its collections cover not only his single, depression-shadowed term but the extraordinary career around it: his work as a mining engineer, his vast humanitarian relief efforts feeding Europe during and after the First World War, and his long public life after the White House.

The museum presents a fuller Hoover than the one fixed in popular memory as the president who failed to stop the Great Depression. It documents the "Great Humanitarian" who organized food relief for millions, and his decades of writing and public service that stretched into the 1960s. The quiet Iowa setting underscores the distance between the orphaned farm boy and the global figure he became.