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Date: September 18, 2007
Contact: Adam Prato, (319) 643-7855

Herbert Hoover National Historic Site will partially close the Friends Meetinghouse beginning on Thursday, September 20, 2007 while the interior rooms are repainted. National Historic Site staff will close and paint one side of the Meetinghouse at a time, so visitors will still be able to enter one half of the building. The staff expects the project to be finished and the Meetinghouse to be fully re-opened by mid October.

“We are sorry for the inconvenience to our visitors, but the repainting project is essential to the maintenance and preservation of this very special building,” explained park Superintendent Cheryl A. Schreier. “When completed, we hope visitors will enjoy a better experience in a newly painted meetinghouse.”

The historic Friends (or Quaker) Meetinghouse is divided into two meeting rooms, one each for men and women, and separated by a partition with sliding panels and a folding door. The Meetinghouse, built in 1857 but later converted into a theater and then a garage, was moved onto the grounds of Herbert Hoover National Historic Site in 1964, where it was restored to appear as it did when the Hoovers attended meetings there in the 1870s and 1880s. As part of the commemorative landscape of the National Historic Site, the Meetinghouse helps tell the story of the formative influences on Herbert Hoover, and his remarkable rise as a businessman, humanitarian, and statesman.

Herbert Hoover National Historic Site and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum are in West Branch, Iowa at exit 254 of I-80. Both are open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Time.