Presidential Libraries

Presidential libraries and museums

The presidential library system began with Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1939 donated his papers and part of his Hyde Park estate to the federal government and asked the National Archives to run it. Every president since has followed, and Herbert Hoover's library in Iowa was added retroactively. Today the National Archives administers 15 physical sites from Hoover to Obama, each a museum of its presidency, a research archive, and usually a piece of deliberate architecture — I. M. Pei's JFK Library on Boston Harbor, the Reagan Library with Air Force One parked inside it, the George W. Bush Center at SMU.

They make a good road-trip list because they're everywhere. Texas alone has three (LBJ in Austin, Bush 41 in College Station, Bush 43 in Dallas). The Midwest has Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Ford's museum in Grand Rapids and library in Ann Arbor, and Lincoln in Springfield. The Obama Presidential Center opened on Chicago's South Side in 2026 and is the newest on the map; the planned Trump and Biden centers will be added when they open.

The historic eleven

Earlier presidents didn't get federal libraries, but their homes and foundations built their own. Mount Vernon's library for George Washington, the Adams family's Stone Library in Quincy, and the Jefferson center at Monticello are research institutions attached to the houses; the Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont, Ohio, opened in 1916 and is the original on which FDR modelled his. Lincoln's in Springfield is the largest of the private ones and the one most worth a detour. This map includes eleven of these sites alongside the NARA fifteen; papers collections housed in university libraries aren't included, since there's nothing to visit.

Click a badge or its pin to mark a library visited, again for want-to-go.

Visiting

The NARA libraries are open year-round with a modest admission charge and the museums are built for a general audience — the Truman Library in Independence was reworked in 2021 and is widely considered the best of them, and the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda confronts Watergate more directly than you'd expect. Most have a replica Oval Office, which becomes a running joke by the fourth one. The research rooms are free and open to anyone with ID, which is how a lot of historians end up on this list. The presidents' graves are usually on the grounds too: Nixon, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Eisenhower, Hoover, FDR, Carter, and Hayes are all buried at their libraries.