• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Touring the Tomb at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site

The Herbert Hoover National Historic Site is located in West Branch, Iowa, ten miles east of Iowa City and offers guided tours for the summer season. It is open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Admission to the historic site, including the birthplace and gravesite, is free. Admission to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum is $6.00 for adults and $3.00 for senior citizens. Children sixteen and under are admitted free.

From the east or west: Take I-80 to exit 254. Travel 0.4 miles north to the Visitors Center. Maps to the gravesite are available at the Visitors Center.

To reach the gravesite from the Hoover National Historic Site on Main Street, turn south on Parkside Drive. Follow Parkside Drive until reaching Library Road. Turn right on Library Road heading west. Follow the signs to President Hoover’s gravesite. Public parking is available near the gravesite.

To reach the grave on foot from the Historic Site, take the walkway from the Visitors Center to the Library Museum. Then follow signs to President Hoover’s gravesite.

For additional information

Herbert Hoover National Historic Site

110 Parkside Drive

P.O. Box 607

West Branch, IA 52358

Phone: (319) 643-2541

Fax: (319) 643-7864

www.nps.gov/heho

“‘I outlived the bastards,’ [Hoover] said.”

—Richard Norton Smith

The white marble gravestones of Herbert and Lou Hoover

Asked in the twilight of life how he managed to survive the long years of ostracism coinciding with the New Deal, Hoover gave a characteristically pungent response. “I outlived the bastards,” he said.

But not even Hoover could outrace the rigors of old age. In October 1964, he learned of a domestic accident involving one of his closest, if most unlikely, friends. “Bathtubs are a menace to ex-presidents,” he informed Harry Truman. “For as you may recall, a bathtub rose up and fractured my vertebrae when I was in Venezuela on your world famine mission in 1946.” It was the last communication sent from Hoover’s Waldorf Towers suite.

His death six days later at age 90 evoked twinges of guilt as well as grief. While he might be remembered by many as “the Great Objector,” columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “that was the tragic result of having been run over by the Great Depression.” Such negativism was not in harmony with Hoover’s “generous, liberal and magnanimous nature.” In common with the crowds who assembled in New York, Washington, and Iowa to bid farewell to the nation’s thirty-first president, Lippmann preferred to remember Hoover as “a bold and brilliant philanthropist who binds up wounds and avoids inflicting them.”

—RNS

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Buried: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York

Thirty-second President - 1933-1945

Born: January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York

Died: April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia

Age at death: 63

Cause of death: Cerebral hemorrhage

Final words: “I have a terrific headache.”

Admission to Franklin Roosevelt Library

and Museum: $14.00

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, master of the fireside chat, was the only president elected to four terms. He was at the nation’s helm during two major events of the twentieth century: the Great Depression and World War II. Governor of New York when he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, Roosevelt spoke of a “New Deal” for the American people, which became a hallmark of his administration.

In addition to the economic crisis at home, events overseas occupied much of the president’s attention. On December 8, 1941, FDR asked Congress to declare war on Japan after the bombing of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. Soon thereafter, the United States enjoined the Allies in Europe. The war lasted through the remainder of Roosevelt’s service as president.

Franklin Roosevelt was a cousin of our twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt. He was also a distant relative of two other