Homestead National Monument of America, a unit of the National Park System, commemorates passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed any qualified person to claim up to 160 acres (0.65 km2) of federally owned land in exchange for five years of residence and the cultivation and improvement of the property. The Act eventually transferred 270,000,000 acres (1,100,000 km2) from public to private ownership.
The national monument is four miles west of Beatrice, Gage County, Nebraska on a site that includes some of the first acres successfully claimed under the Homestead Act. The national monument was first included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966 (ID 66000115).
Read more about Homestead National Monument Of America: Homestead Heritage Center and Education Center, Tallgrass Prairie, Palmer-Epard Cabin, Freeman School, Administrative History
Famous quotes containing the words homestead, national, monument and/or america:
“These Flemish pictures of old days;
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“If the national security is involved, anything goes. There are no rules. There are people so lacking in roots about what is proper and what is improper that they don’t know there’s anything wrong in breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party.”
—Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900–1980)
“The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)