If you find yourself in Iowa City, Iowa and decide to hop on Interstate 80 to the quaint, Midwest town of West Branch, then you will encounter the birth home and Presidential Library and Museum of the 31st President of the United States, Herbert Hoover.

As you enter West Branch from I-80 and turn onto South Downey St., you will see the library to your right. After a tour of the museum and a walk up to the gravesite, where Hoover rests beside his wife Lou Henry Hoover, a visitor can walk down a path that follows the west branch of the Wapsinonoc Creek and see the Friends’ Meeting House, where, as a boy, Hoover and his family sat through silent Quaker Sunday services. Continue north along this road, and you will come across Hoover’s small, white, two-room childhood home. Then, you can walk to the National Historic Site and learn about his childhood. After the two hours or so it takes to see everything there is at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum and National Historic Site, you can walk up Main St. to grab a bite to eat at Herb N’ Lou’s Pizza and depart the small town of West Branch having seen the birthplace of the first president born west of the Mississippi.

This historic site is quiet. It might even be described as quaint in comparison to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Museum in Abilene, Kan., or John F. Kennedy’s Library in Boston, Mass. Unlike Harry Truman’s Presidential Library, there is no larger-than-life statue of the titular man in front of Hoover’s Library. But there is one statue on the grounds, and the story behind it encapsulates the selfless public service that epitomized the life of Herbert Hoover.

The plaque on the statue is not in English. It does not seem to fit the grounds at all. The statue is a seven-and-a-half-foot tall bronze sculpture by a Belgian sculptor named Aguste Puttemans. The statue depicts the Egyptian Goddess Isis. She wears a veil over her body and in her right hand the torch of life, whose three flames represent past, present, and future, and in her left hand she holds the key of life.

The Statue of Isis was a gift to Herbert Hoover from the people of Belgium for his work during World War I directing the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, after he saved their country from starvation. It was originally shipped in 1922 to California’s Stanford University, where Hoover graduated in 1895 in the inaugural class with a geology degree. It remained there until 1939, when the President and Mrs. Hoover moved it to West Branch. The statue is placed on the south side of the creek and overlooks his boyhood home.

If you’d like to visit the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum during a long weekend, it isn’t too crazy of a trip. West Branch is just under a five-hour drive away from Park University and there are two major cities on the way to visit and stay the night if you wanted to do a two-day trip.