Inside the New Hoover Presidential Library & Museum

1. Touch the Busts of Bert and Lou

Just inside the entrance, portrait busts of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover greet visitors, and they're meant to be touched. Hollywood special effects artist and sculptor Rod Maxwell built them from historical photographs, working through rounds of digital sculpting and small 3D-printed studies before the final busts were cast. Beyond the honorarium, they're an invitation: visually impaired guests, and anyone else curious, can physically connect with the Hoovers before stepping further into the museum.

2. Listen for the Soundscape

Slow down in the opening gallery, Welcome to West Branch, and the room starts talking back. Cicadas, birdsong, and wind move through a soundscape built into the space. Near replicas of Jesse Hoover's blacksmith tools, a faint ring of metal on metal suggests Jesse himself is still at work. Trains sound in the distance, and underneath it all, a woman hums: Hulda Hoover's favorite hymn, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains." It's a small design choice that does a lot of work, dropping visitors into a specific place and time before a single label is read.

3. See Their Courtship Told in Storybook Style

The gallery covering Bert and Lou's early years, their mentors, their shared love of books, how they met, their time together at Stanford, is illustrated in an old-fashioned book-illustration style. The format isn't decorative; it grew directly out of the thing that first drew the two of them together.

4. Trace a Life on the Move

The Life on the Jump gallery holds an animated map tracking the Hoovers' travels across the fourteen years between their marriage and the start of World War I. Hoover's own memoirs, it turns out, got a lot of the dates and locations wrong. So the museum team rebuilt the record from its own archives and ship manifests, compiling, for the first time, a complete account of where the couple went. The total distance covered is enough to circumnavigate the globe roughly eighteen times.

5. Find the Curators' Favorite Object

Ask a curator here what they'd grab first, and the answer is consistent: De Re Metallica, the centuries-old mining text Bert and Lou translated together from Latin into English. It's a working artifact of their partnership, both professional and personal, and it now has its own dedicated gallery.

6. Watch American Individualism

A five-minute film distills Hoover's American Individualism philosophy, a subject the museum team decided needed to be felt, not just read off a wall label. Built around his work with the American Relief Administration feeding a starving Russia, it threads through the entire museum, from the opening gallery to his post-presidency, and the team calls it perhaps the single most important piece in the building.

7. Meet the People Behind "Secretary of Commerce"

Rather than list Hoover's accomplishments as Commerce Secretary, this gallery hands the story to the people who lived it: Lou and her expansion of the Girl Scouts, aviator Jack Knight, Duke Ellington and the standardization of radio airwaves, the Better Homes in America campaign with Caroline Bartlett Crane, and Olympic gold medalist Aileen Riggin, a nod to Lou's advocacy for women in sports.

8. See the Depression Story Retold

A four-minute media piece, four years and countless conversations with historians in the making, tackles the Great Depression and Hoover's response head-on, aiming to dispel the long-running myth of Hoover as a "do-nothing" president. A century of scholarship has told a different story, of a president who fought the Depression aggressively and with innovation, and this piece is built to shift how visitors see that legacy.

9. Discover the Philanthropy They Kept Quiet

Tucked into the museum is a gallery on the Hoovers' philanthropy, carried out entirely outside their public roles and deliberately never publicized. Much of it wasn't known until after their deaths. The museum notes the Hoovers likely wouldn't have wanted this work spotlighted, but included it anyway, for a fuller picture of who they were.

10.0Listen for the Carillon Bells

The visit closes by connecting Hoover's legacy to the present through the Uncommon Iowan awards, recognizing Iowans and students for public service today. A final gallery covers the Hoover Institution at Stanford, which Hoover considered his greatest legacy, and its carillon bells, which ring out several times an hour with Hoover's favorite piece, "Battle Hymn of the Republic."