Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover, (1874-1964), 31st president of the United States. Resident of Tianjin 1899-1900.
He gained prominence in four major careers: engineering, international relief work, government and politics, and reform of governmental bureaucracy. Although Hoover spent 30 years in public service, the highest point of his public career, his presidency, was dominated by the Depression and proved a bitter disappointment.

Herbert Clark Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, on Aug. 10, 1874. He was the second of three children in a family descended from a long line of Quakers. His father, Jesse Clark Hoover, a village blacksmith, died of typhoid fever when Herbert was six years old. Less than three years later, his mother, Huldah Minthorn Hoover, died of pneumonia. In 1884 he went to Newberg, Oregon, to live with an uncle, Henry John Minthorn. There Herbert attended a Quaker academy his uncle helped direct. In 1888, Dr. Minthorn moved to Salem, Oregon, where Hoover worked in his land settlement business as an office boy and attended night school. Then, at 17, Hoover entered Stanford University as a special student. He showed a marked aptitude for mathematics and geology, graduating with a degree in engineering in May 1895.

After graduation, Hoover worked at odd jobs in California gold mines and as a mining engineer in Colorado; he later joined the staff of a leading mining engineer in San Francisco. In 1897, at 23, he went to work for the British mining firm of Bewick, Moreing and Company as chief of its gold-mining operations in Western Australia. Herbert Hoover's dual role would be as the Chinese government's resident chief engineer of the Bureau of Mines for Chihli and Jehol provinces, and Bewick Moreing's representative in China. . He settled in Tianjin with his newly wed wife, Lou Henry Hoover, and they lived through the days of the siege of the Boxer Rebellion, of which these photographs and the piece of a grenade that exploded in the Hoover mansion give ample witness.

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