HERBERT HOOVER: LIFE BEFORE THE PRESIDENCY

Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874. For the first nine years of his life, he lived in the small town of West Branch, Iowa, the place of his birth. His Quaker father, Jessie Clark Hoover, a blacksmith and farm equipment salesman, suffered a heart attack and died when Herbert was six years old. Three years later, the boy's mother, Huldah Minthorn Hoover, developed pneumonia and also passed away, orphaning Herbert, his older brother Theodore, and little sister Mary. Passed around among relatives for a few years, Hoover ended up with his uncle, Dr. John Minthorn, who lived in Oregon.

The young Hoover was shy, sensitive, introverted, and somewhat suspicious, characteristics that developed, at least in part, in reaction to the loss of his parents at such a young age. He attended Friends Pacific Academy in Newberg, Oregon, earning average to failing grades in all subjects except math.

Determined, nevertheless, to go to the newly established Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Hoover studied hard and barely passed the university's entrance exam. He went on to major in geology and participated in a host of extracurricular activities, serving as class treasurer of the junior and senior student bodies and managing the school baseball and football teams.

To pay his tuition, Hoover worked as a clerk in the registration office and showed considerable entrepreneurial skill by starting a student laundry service.

Career and Monetary Success

During the summers, Hoover worked as a student assistant on geological survey teams in Arkansas, California, and Nevada.

After his graduation in 1895, he looked hard to find work as a surveyor but ended up laboring seventy hours a week at a gold mine near Nevada City, California, pushing ore carts.

Luck came his way with an office job in San Francisco, putting him in touch with a firm in need of an engineer to inspect and evaluate mines for potential purchase.

Hoover then moved to Australia in 1897 and China in 1899, where he worked as a mining engineer until 1902. A string of similar jobs took him all over the world and helped Hoover become a giant in his field.

He opened his own mining consulting business in 1908; by 1914, Hoover was financially secure, earning his wealth from high-salaried positions, his ownership of profitable Burmese silver mines, and royalties from writing the leading textbook on mining engineering.

His wife, Lou Henry Hoover, traveled with him everywhere he went. Herbert and Lou met in college, where she was the sole female geology major at Stanford. He proposed to her by cable from Australia as he prepared to move to China; she accepted by return wire and they married in 1899.

The couple was in China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, a time when Lou helped nurse wounded Western diplomats and soldiers while Herbert assisted in the fighting to defend Tianjin, a city near the uprising. By the time the couple returned home to America in 1917, Lou had learned to shoot a gun and had mastered eight languages.

... Herbert Hoover was born in a tiny, two-room cottage in West Branch, Iowa. Orphaned at age 9, Herbert moved to Oregon to live with his uncle, John Minthorn, until he entered Stanford University in 1891 where he earned a degree in geology.

Over the next two decades, Hoover traveled the world and made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant; he and his young wife, Lou Henry Hoover, established homes in Australia, China, London, and their beloved California.

After World War I, Lou Hoover designed and built their dream home next to the campus of Stanford University, but the Hoovers spent more than a decade living in Washington DC while Herbert Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce and President of the United States.

After leaving the White House in 1933, the Hoovers returned to California and later established a second home in an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.

When Mrs. Hoover passed away in 1944, Mr. Hoover donated their California home to Stanford University and lived for the last 20 years of his life at the Waldorf.

Ref: HERBERT HOOVER: LIFE BEFORE THE PRESIDENCY (hoover.archives.gov)