Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874-October 20, 1964), mining engineer, humanitarian, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and 31st President of the United States, was the son of Jesse Hoover, a blacksmith, and Hulda Minthorn Hoover, a seamstress and recorded minister in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, where he enjoyed fishing in the local creek and working in his father’s blacksmith shop.
Hoover. For the next four years he was mainly abroad, working in mines in western Australia and China.
He graduated from Stamford University in the mid-1890s and came to England in 1897, when he was taken on by the mining firm of Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London based mining company. Over the next two decades to make his fortune as an international mini ng engineer and financier.
However, in the spring of 1902 he returned to England. Hoover’s state that: ‘My wife searched out a small country house at Walton-on-Thames’. In a footnote he added the ironic twist: ‘curiously it was known as The White House’.
‘The White House’ was built in 1768 and appears on local maps from 1812. The property still stands today, on West Grove.
Hoover lived there for only a short time and was soon called away oversees. Mrs Hoover stayed there a little longer, but by the birth of her child in 1903 she was living in London, overlooking Hyde Park.
Herbert Hoover died on October 20, 1964. On October 29, the body of Herbert Hoover was interred in a simple grave on an Iowa hill overlooking the cottage where he was born.
Little known fact : On March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed a law that made “The Star-Spangled Banner,” based on an 1814 poem by Francis Scott Key (1779-1843), America’s national anthem.