116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: Jesse Hoover’s blacksmith shop
‘I stepped on a chip of hot iron and carry the brand of Iowa on my foot to this day’
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Jesse and Rachel Negus were born in Ohio in 1837 and 1839, respectively. They acquired Iowa land from the government and moved to Cedar County, where their only surviving child, William, was born in 1870.
The barn the Neguses built near West Branch would eventually become part of the national historic site honoring Herbert Hoover, the only U.S. president born in Iowa.
The Negus family belonged to the Conservative Friends (Quakers), and they knew the Hoover family, who were also Quaker. Jesse helped solicit funds to build their meeting house in 1888. After a lot of donated labor, the building cost $2,542.60.
Jesse and Rachel celebrated their golden wedding anniversary quietly at William’s home in 1908.
In February 1916, Jesse and Rachel moved in with William, whose home was nearby. Rachel died in June.
Each year Jesse looked forward to the annual Negus family reunion that drew more than 80 family members from Johnson, Cedar, Muscatine and other Iowa counties. He was the oldest attendee at the 1920 reunion in Muscatine. He was too sick to attend in 1921. He died Oct. 1, 1922.
Negus barn
Two organizations, the Hoover Birthplace Committee of 1939 and the Hoover Birthplace Foundation, which started in 1954, joined forces in 1957 as the Herbert Hoover Foundation Inc. to reproduce the blacksmith shop that once stood near the Hoover homestead in West Branch.
Since the original shop had long since been demolished, the foundation wanted to use materials from a building from the same era.
Records showed the Negus family had built a barn on their homestead in 1872, a year after the West Branch blacksmith shop was built. Jesse Negus’ 36-by-50-foot, two-story pine barn, constructed with dowels and pegs, was still standing on the Lloyd Henderson farm in 1957. Mrs. Henderson was the granddaughter of Jesse Negus.
The Hoover organization purchased the barn from the Hendersons.
Replicating the shop
William B. Anderson, chairman of the foundation’s executive committee, coordinated the reproduction effort. Herbert Hoover’s older brother, Theodore, drew illustrations of how he remembered their father Jesse’s blacksmith shop. Des Moines architectural firm Wetherall & Harrison did the design work for the shop for free.
All wood from the Negus barn used in the reproduction was treated for dry rot and termites.
The stone foundation was brought in from Stone City quarries, and a brick forge came from an old blacksmith shop 4 miles away.
Hinges for the doors were created by a veteran Des Moines iron worker. A watering trough outside was reproduced.
Jesse Hoover’s original shop had a lean-to next to it. Both the lean-to and the shop had large double doors that facilitated moving wagons in and out.
Furnishing the shop turned out to be fairly easy. When people heard of the replica, donations of machinery and tools started flowing in, most of them authentic to the timeline of the shop.
In addition, visitors sometimes asked if the blacksmith shop had a certain tool. If it didn’t, they would volunteer to send it.
All of the gifts were catalogued and numbered. The numbers referred to records of who donated the piece and where it came from.
1957 dedication
When the blacksmith shop was dedicated June 20, 1957, the principal speaker was Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was greeted upon his arrival in Iowa City by Hoover’s son, Allan, and Cedar Rapids industrialist Howard Hall.
Fred Maytag II of Newton presided at the dedication ceremony. He read a telegram sent by Hoover from San Francisco to Anderson, chairman of the Hoover Birthplace Foundation.
“I hope you will express my great regret that I cannot be present at the dedication and my deep appreciation to the governor of Iowa (Herschel Loveless) and all of our Iowa friends for this further tribute from them,” the telegraph stated.
The Gazette reported, “The building has been carefully constructed in the pioneer fashion, using wooden pegs instead of nails. The forge is a reproduction of one used by Jesse Hoover, and the other equipment is of the type used by blacksmiths in the 1870s and 1880s.”
Orphaned at age 9, Hoover and his brother, Theodore, and sister, Mary, ended up living with an uncle in Oregon. Hoover once said he didn’t remember much about the blacksmith shop his father ran from 1871 to 1878, but he did have one vivid memory.
“Playing barefoot around the blacksmith shop,” Hoover said, “I stepped on a chip of hot iron and carry the brand of Iowa on my foot to this day.”
The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum was dedicated Aug. 10, 1962, and Hoover Park became a national historic site under the Department of the Interior in 1964, the year Hoover died. The library was expanded in 1970, the year the National Park Service took over everything but the library and museum.
The Hoover library and museum are now being renovated and are closed to the public, but the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site is still open.
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