The buildings and grounds are managed by the National Park Service to commemorate the life of Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States.

Within the next few years, Hoover was orphaned and left West Branch to live with relatives in Oregon.

The birthplace cottage fell into private hands and became a tourist destination following Hoover's nomination to the presidency in 1928.

Among the buildings that now stand in the park are a blacksmith shop similar to the one owned by his father, the first West Branch schoolhouse, and the Quaker meetinghouse where the Hoover family worshiped.

Herbert and his wife, First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, are buried under a monument designed by William Wagner.

Herbert Clark Hoover spent the first eleven years of his life in West Branch, Iowa, a small farming community with a population around 500.

The two-room cottage, built for recent settlers Jesse Clark Hoover and his wife Hulda, was only 14 by 20 feet (4.3 m × 6.1 m) and had two rooms.

[6] The prosperity of the Hoover family suddenly ended on December 13, 1880, when Jesse died of rheumatic fever.

He campaigned on behalf of Warren G. Harding in 1920, who rewarded Hoover by appointing him Secretary of Commerce in his cabinet.

[8] Herbert Hoover died from internal bleeding in 1964, enjoying the longest retirement of any President to that point.

In 1928, when Hoover was nominated as president, tourists began to come to West Branch to see the birthplace of the candidate.

He demolished the two-story house and turned the cottage back to its original orientation (facing east).

[10] Hoover and his family believed that, by recreating the surroundings of his early life, visitors could be inspired by the experience.

She oversaw all of the early developments, including the relocation of the Isis statue and the acquisition of land around the birthplace.

She also developed a retaining wall for Hoover Creek and had a footpath built over it to connect the cottage with Isis.

The large crowds that came to celebrate the Iowan inspired Allan Hoover to further develop the site in time for his father's 80th birthday in 1954.

In collaboration with the Hoover celebration in 1954, the Boy Scouts of America built another picnic shelter and dedicated a bronze plaque to the former president.

[10] As the Herbert Hoover Birthplace, the site was declared a 28-acre (11 ha) National Historic Landmark on June 23, 1965.

The complex originally included twenty-eight buildings, fourteen sites, eight structures, and eight objects over 67.49 acres (27.31 ha).

[1][10] The National Historic Site features West Branch several buildings that would have been standing during Hoover's childhood there.

[12] Near the gravesite is a tallgrass prairie, designed to resemble the type of landscape that early West Branch settlers would have witnessed.

[13] The large statue of the Egyptian deity Isis was presented to Hoover as a gift from the people of Belgium, in gratitude for his famine relief efforts on behalf of their country during the war.

Sculpted by Belgian native Auguste Puttemans [fr], the statue originally decorated Hoover's home in Palo Alto, California.

[14] The site also includes historic houses on Downey and Poplar Streets that belonged to significant West Branch residents.

The project involved widening the existing creek channel, replacement of bridges, and the construction of a 10-acre retention basin in the park's tallgrass prairie.

Hoover briefly lived with the Miles family in 1882 on the Osage Nation reservation while permanent plans were being made for his rearing.

However, the National Park Service decided to move the house to the site because of its Queen Anne architecture.

[10] Hoover originally intended to simply donate his papers to his alma mater, Stanford University, and set up a small museum of memorabilia in West Branch.

The painting was produced before the demolition of the Portland Scellers extension and relocation of the original cottage, so the face of the birthplace itself is obscured at the rear of the building in the center.