Herbert Hoover Birthplace National Historical Place

So I'll start my first review in almost two years with this revelation that the United States National Park Service is AWESOME. It was during this trip that my policy of searching for NPS sites before anything else started. At this location, I bought a small "passport" that I can put cancellations in for every site I go to. There are several geographical sections that the book is broken into and opportunities for additional cancellations for special events or even the stickers they feature annually.

I found myself in Cedar Rapids, Iowa right before their rainy season picked up in March of 2010. When booking the flights (since this was for work) I quickly searched to see what was around, and I saw that about an hour from the airport was the Herbert Hoover National Birthplace.

The area its in is an interesting little piece of land with a faux village, museum, Hoover's birthplace and final resting place in the area. My first stop was the Museum, which charged about $12 for entry. There was a story about his upbringing, and all of the awards (large and small) that he received due to his work as a diplomat and later president. The Great Depression started when Hoover was in office so some can argue that he was a much better diplomat than president. Like many other presidential museums, the exhibits opened my eyes to what he did that maybe wouldn't have had a direct impact on where my family came from.

The museum itself had enough information to keep someone occupied for a few hours. The exhibits were full of his awards for the first three-quarters of it and it was overwhelming but I can't think of a better way to put it together. The presidency section was small, seeing as he was a one-term president under whom anything that could have gone wrong probably did, but it highlight his work in American agriculture. One thing the presidency section did right was it exposed the infrastructure of the exhibit, an artsy way to put that Hoover had the experience and the smarts to be a good president, things just didn't exactly go right.

Outside of the museum was a small demonstration of the Quaker village that Hoover was born in. There was a meeting house (plain even by Quaker standards) and his birth place. Both had audio for self-guided tours which were helpful and there may have been more but like I mentioned, I wasn't there during high tourist time so it was not exactly comfortable to do all of the walking that the day could have had.

From what I could gather, the Herbert Hoover Birthplace has facilities for camping and RVing so this is a good weekend place in the right weather.