- Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer at Bweick, Moreing and Company where, in 1899, he was transferred to China to represent the company there. He and his wife Lou lived there until 1902. During their time in China, they both became fluent in Chinese, and when they were in the White House, the would often speak in Chinese to keep their conversations private from eavesdroppers.
- Herbert Hoover is the first president (in order of service though not the first in death) to be buried at the site of his presidential library. His library and gravesite are at the site of his birth in West Branch, Iowa. This pattern of the presidents being buried at their presidential libraries has continued nearly unbroken ever since (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson being the only exceptions).
- Hoover was a Quaker (one of two Quaker presidents, the other being Richard Nixon), and the Quakers did not believe it appropriate to have large monuments or flowery epitaphs at gravesites. So, in my opinion, whoever designed his gravesite did a marvelous job of balancing the significance of the man who, in addition to serving in the highest office in the land, single-handedly was responsible for saving millions of lives in the wake of each World War due to his famine relief organization; to balance that significance with the requisite Quaker simplicity. His actual grave marker is a large, flat marble slab inscribed only with his name and years of birth and death. His wife’s identical slab is next to his. These two were placed in a beautifully landscaped garden plot which, in its elegance, makes this my favorite gravesite of the over-1,000 gravesites I have visited.