Welcome to the Herbert Hoover Federal Memorial
While Hoover Tower is nearly impossible to miss when visiting campus (and certainly should not be missed if you get a chance to get to the Observation Deck), the actual Federal Memorial right next door is often overlooked by tourists and students alike! It's a neat little spot that was established by an act of Congress back in 1975. Come explore, and if you do the Hoover Maneuver right, you'll find our hidden cache.
The memorial can be found in an outdoor courtyard of the Hoover Institution. While Stanford's own Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the United States, the history of the Hoover Instiution begins much earlier than his presidency. The Hoover War Collection was established as a library and archives, cementing the Institution’s roots in history and scholarship. Herbert Hoover conceived the idea for gathering materials on World War I while he was organizing humanitarian relief for Belgium. He began the collection in June 1919, when he was at the Paris Peace Conference advising President Wilson. The founding document of the Hoover Institution is a telegram from Herbert Hoover to Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur offering $50,000 for the collecting effort and instructing Wilbur to send Professor Ephraim D. Adams to Paris to begin work.
Introduced in Congress in 1974, the Herbert Hoover Memorial Act authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to make grants for the construction of a memorial building at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, as a memorial to Herbert Hoover, at Stanford, California.
Today you can come explore the memorial courtyard and see the Presidential Seal any time, day or night. To locate the cache, however, you'll have to do a little sleuthing on site. Look for the stone column engraved with Herbert Hoover's name. Engraved above his name, you'll find 5 epithets, words used to remember the man and his contributions.
***A***B
**C***D*****
*E***F***
G****H ***I**J
**K**L
Identify the actual letters represented above by ABCDEFGHIJKL.
Assign them their standard numerical values (A=1, Z=26) and solve for the cache coordinates.
FINAL LOCATION:
N 37° 25.(A-H)(K-G)(F-C)
W 122° 10.(D-J)(E-B)(I-L)
The final location is just a short walk away.