A Mini-Museum Comes to Town: Meet "Hoover's Hometown Neighbors"

This year's Hoover's Hometown Days brings something new to the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site: a mini-museum built entirely out of the neighbors, partners, and history-keepers who make this corner of Iowa special.

On Saturday, August 8, from 11am to 4pm, the grounds of the Historic Site will fill with museums, historical organizations, National Park Service units, and hands-on demonstrations all gathered in one place for the day. For one day, the lawn itself becomes a living collection of the people, places, and history that surround this town.

West Branch is small. The guest list for this year's Hoover's Hometown Days is not.

Start with the guests of honor: Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt will be walking the grounds all day for photos and conversation as part of America's 250th birthday celebration.

Then look around, because you're standing in a reunion of Iowa's cultural institutions.

The African American Museum of Iowa will be here alongside the Iowa Quilt Museum, just down from the John Wayne Birthplace & Museum and Kalona Historical Village. Brucemore is coming, and so is the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium, the National Pearl Button Museum, the Sawmill Museum, the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, Midwest Old Threshers, the Lincoln Highway Association, Cedar County Conservation, and the Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area, which ties this whole region's farm history together. It's the kind of lineup you'd normally have to drive all over the state to see in one day.

You'll also meet Wade Fowler, known online as the Millennial Stone Cleaner, a Des Moines gravestone conservator with over a million social media followers who has spent years restoring forgotten headstones across the country. If you've ever scrolled past one of his videos, you know exactly why people love watching him work.

The military history runs deep here too.

Rock Island Arsenal Museum — the U.S. Army's second-oldest museum — will be on hand, joined by the United States Navy History and Heritage Command, the institutional memory of the entire U.S. Navy. And the National Parks Conservation Association will be here representing the century-old advocacy group that helped shape the park system Hoover's own home now belongs to.

Speaking of that system, the National Park Service is bringing its own neighbors.

There's a genuinely nice bit of trivia buried in this lineup: Effigy Mounds National Monument, preserving over 200 sacred American Indian mounds along the Mississippi, was established by executive order signed by none other than Harry S. Truman in 1949, and the Harry S Truman National Historic Site will be here representing his legacy directly. Alongside them: the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail and the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, connecting Hoover's story to the wider network of places the Park Service protects.

And nothing about this day sits still.

Watch a blacksmith work metal the old way, a gunsmith turn scrimshaw into art, or someone make rope, cobble a shoe, or knit socks by hand and hear what daily life looked like for women on the frontier, not from a placard, but from someone doing it in front of you.

Bring a chair, because the music doesn't stop either. Suzanne Smith and Smith Studio Jazz, harmonica player Phil Hague, and the bass-and-fiddle duo of Mike and Stephanie Bray will be playing throughout the afternoon.

This is Hoover's hometown. These are its neighbors. Come meet them.