Cardinal Roots

Born to a Quaker family and orphaned at age nine, Herbert Hoover left Iowa in November 1885 bound for Oregon and the home of his maternal uncle. At the age of fourteen he left school to work as a clerk in his uncle's real estate business. 

In 1891, without having graduated from high school, the industrious Herbert Hoover found his place in the first class of Stanford University, where he studied geology and mining. It was at Stanford that he made lifelong friends and found a mentor in geology professor John Casper Branner. He flourished in his major, was elected student body treasurer, and even found love with the university’s first female geology student.

Lou Henry grew up with an interest in the great outdoors and loved camping and horseback riding. She initially pursued a certificate in education, but after hearing a lecture by John Casper Branner, she was inspired to enroll as a student at Stanford, where she majored in geology and graduated in 1898.

Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover married in Monterey, California on February 10, 1899, and left the next day for China, where he had secured work as a mining engineer. One of their shared successes together included completing the first English translation of the seminal Latin work, De Re Metallica, which still holds an important place on the shelves of metallurgists and geologists across the world.

Herbert Hoover—engineer, humanitarian, statesman—was for a great many years Stanford University’s most influential alumnus, trustee, and benefactor.

Joining the board of trustees in 1912, he served for nearly fifty years. Among the institutions he helped found on campus were the Food Research Institute (1921–1996) and the Graduate School of Business. He saved the medical school during times of financial hardship and helped finance what is now the “old” student union.

He devoted the most energy to his creation and namesake, the Hoover Institution, which he founded in 1919. Herbert Hoover's wealth and fame, and his commitment to excellence at Stanford gave him an extraordinary influence at his alma mater, second only to that of its founders, Leland and Jane Stanford.

In 1919 Lou Henry Hoover set in motion the construction of the Hoovers’ home on the Stanford campus. The family was soon off to Washington, DC, when Herbert Hoover was named secretary of commerce. They returned to Stanford to live only after leaving the White House in 1933.

From that point on, Lou Henry Hoover regularly involved herself in the life of the university, from supporting its libraries and athletics groups to encouraging the creation of a music department and starting the Friends of Stanford Music. In honor of her devotion to the school, she was named an Honorary Fellow in 1941 at Stanford’s fiftieth anniversary commencement, at which she spoke to the graduating class.

After Lou Henry Hoover’s death in 1944, the house was donated to the university. It has ever since been the university president’s home. In 1985 it was declared a National Historic Landmark.