Homestead National Historical Park

The Homestead Act took effect on January 1, 1863, and that day Daniel Freeman filed a claim at the land office in Brownville for ground on Cub Creek, west of Beatrice. The story that he filed just after midnight while serving as a Union spy came from Freeman later and has no evidence behind it. He married Agnes Suiter, who had been engaged to his late brother James, and in 1865 brought her here; they raised eight children. Over the life of the act about 270 million acres passed from public to private hands.

That land was not empty. The Jiwere and Nutachi, the Otoe and Missouria, had been confined since 1855 to a reservation on the Big Blue River south of here along the Kansas line, where they could no longer hunt buffalo, the promised food and medicine often failed to come, and parcels were sold off to non-Indians. In 1881 the nations sold the reservation and some 320 people walked eighteen days to Red Rock in Indian Territory, where the Otoe-Missouria Tribe is today. The park's Heritage Center, its roofline shaped like a plow breaking sod, tells of the act and what it did to the people already here.

The Freeman School, used from 1872 to 1967, was the subject of Freeman's suit against Bible reading in class, which the Nebraska Supreme Court decided for him in 1902. The Palmer-Epard cabin of 1867 was moved here in 1950. The park's restored tallgrass prairie, about 100 acres, is the oldest restoration in the National Park System.