Five Presidents: A Presidential Library Road Trip
There is a particular kind of traveller who is working through the presidential libraries. If that is you, here is a loop out of Medora that adds four more.
A distinction worth getting right. The National Archives operates a system of sixteen presidential libraries, running from Herbert Hoover through Joseph R. Biden Jr. Not every presidential library belongs to it. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is privately funded and independently operated by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation; Roosevelt's presidential papers are held chiefly at the Library of Congress. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield sits outside the federal system too, run as an agency of the State of Illinois. Four of the sites on this route are federal. Two are not. That mix is the point.
Roughly 2,600 miles over seven days. Two of those are long transit days across the plains, which is the price of starting and finishing in the badlands.
Days one and two: south to Eisenhower
Day one is transit. Leave the badlands on I 94 east, then turn south down I 29 through the Red River Valley to Sioux Falls. No library today — just the run from the buttes to the eastern prairie.
Day two carries on to Abilene, Kansas, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home. The thing to find here is the note Eisenhower wrote in pencil on 5 June 1944, taking sole blame in advance if the Normandy landings failed. He never had to use it. He put it in his wallet and forgot about it for a month.
Day one: 564 miles, roughly 9 hours · Day two: 393 miles, about 6 hours, plus half a day on the campus
Days three and four: Truman and Lincoln
A short hop north-east to Independence, Missouri, and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. Thomas Hart Benton painted Independence and the Opening of the West straight onto the lobby wall in 1960 and 1961, with Truman looking over his shoulder; Truman insisted he not be in it. Allow three hours for the museum and the replica Oval Office.
Then east across Missouri to Springfield, Illinois. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is the busiest presidential museum in the country, and Illinois holds one of only five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's own hand. It lives here.
Day three: 161 miles, about 2.5 hours · Day four: 316 miles, about 5 hours, plus three to four hours in the museum
Day five: Hoover, where the system began
North to West Branch, Iowa. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum is the earliest presidency in the National Archives system, and the museum reopens on 6 August 2026 after its first major renovation in three decades — worth confirming by phone before you plan around it, because reopening dates move.
The surrounding Herbert Hoover National Historic Site is free and open regardless: the two-room 1871 birthplace cottage, and the graves of Herbert and Lou Hoover on the hill above it. Standing outside that cottage and then walking into the presidential museum is the whole American story in about two hundred yards.
217 miles, about 3.5 hours · a long stop
Days six and seven: the road home
West across Iowa and back up I 29 to Sioux Falls, then the long run to Medora. You finish where you started, in the country that made the one president on this trip who never got a federal library.
If you want a sixth
The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan holds the actual staircase from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. It adds roughly 700 miles round trip and two days, so treat it as an extension rather than a stop. Note that the Ford Library is in Ann Arbor and the Museum is in Grand Rapids — two cities, two buildings, and it catches people out.
Before you plan
The four National Archives sites — Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower and Ford — close during any lapse in federal appropriations. Admission prices and seasonal hours change; confirm each directly rather than relying on this page. And all mileages here are planning estimates, not surveyed distances.
Day six: 406 miles, about 6.5 hours · Day seven: 564 miles, roughly 9 hours