Last updated: April 1, 2021
Person
Eli Hoover
National Archives & Records Administration
Quick Facts
Significance:
Grandfather to President Herbert Hoover
Place of Birth:
Miami County, Ohio
Date of Birth:
July 17, 1820
Place of Death:
Hubbard, Iowa
Date of Death:
July 24, 1892
Place of Burial:
Hubbard, Iowa
Cemetery Name:
Hubbard Cemetery
Herbert Hoover did not mention his grandfather Eli by name in his memoirs, but they shared an important trait. Eli is the earliest Hoover known to be interested in mechanical things. He passed on that interest to his sons Jesse and Joseph and, later, to his grandsons Theodore and Herbert.
Eli Hoover was born in a Quaker settlement near Dayton, Ohio, the son of Jesse and Rebecca Yount Hoover. He married Mary Davis in 1840. They raised a family of five children, including Herbert Hoover’s father, Jesse. Mary Davis Hoover died 1853. The next year, Eli and his family, his parents, brothers and sisters and their families left Ohio to settle in Cedar County, Iowa. The Hoovers purchased farms barely a mile apart in Springdale Township, now within the city limits of West Branch. Eli married Hannah Leonard in 1854 and they raised a second family of four children. In 1871 Eli helped his son, Jesse, build the cottage where his grandson, Herbert, would be born three years later.
In the 1870s the Eli Hoover family moved to Hardin County in central Iowa. Returning to West Branch in 1879, Eli went into business manufacturing a cattle watering pump that he had invented and patented. The basic principle of the pump was that a cow stepped on a platform. The weight of the cow operated the pump, filling a nearby trough. According to Theodore Hoover, his younger brother, Bert, spent many hours with Eli in the pump shop:
“My brother was very fond of watching Grandfather at his work, and I think he spoiled Bert by giving him everything he asked for. At any rate, one day his earnest desire was for a keen hatchet, which was given him, as everything else was; and as a result he will show you, children, a very peculiar scar on his left forefinger where he all but cut it off.”
In 1884 Eli Hoover, his wife and younger children again left West Branch to settle in Hardin County, Iowa. Their new farm home became part of a small developing town, Hubbard. Eli Hoover had a portion of his farm surveyed as town lots for what was known as “Hoover’s Addition” to the new townsite. At some point, Eli and Hannah Hoover moved to a house in town and operated a sorghum mill.
While driving a load of hay in July 1892, Eli was overcome by the heat, fell off his wagon, and was badly injured, dying of his wounds a short time later, just a week after his 72nd birthday. He was buried in the Hubbard Cemetery under a limestone marker carved to look like a tree trunk.