Homestead National Monument of America - Administrative History

Administrative History

Daniel Freeman (1826–1908), a native of Ohio, filed the first homestead claim in the Brownville, Nebraska land office on January 1, 1863. By the mid-1880s, Freeman also claimed to have been the first homesteader in the nation. A relentless self-promoter, Freeman eventually amassed more than 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) and became a prominent citizen of Gage County. As early as 1884, he first proposed the idea of memorializing himself as the earliest homesteader, and shortly after his death in 1908, Beatrice residents talked of preserving his homestead as a national park.

Proposals to create such a park were rejected until during the mid-1920s, the influential Senator George W. Norris suggested a historical museum of agricultural implements be established on the Freeman property and the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a marker there.

In 1934, Beatrice citizens organized the National Homestead Park Association, reinvigorating the movement. In 1935, Norris and newly elected congressman Henry C. Luckey of Lincoln introduced legislation to create the park, which eventually became law in March 1936. But federal funding for the purchase was not obtained until March 1938. Negotiations with the Freeman heirs “dragged on for months over the value of the land,” and condemnation proceedings were instigated to bring them to terms. The government took possession at the end of the year.

A few improvements were made to the site before American entrance into World War II effectively ended both visitation and development. In the 1950s, the National Park Service acquired the Palmer-Epard cabin and built a visitor center as part of its Mission 66 program. A small museum there exhibited some of the artifacts donated to the park by the Gage County Historical Society in 1948. By 1981 the national monument had five permanent employees, one part-time employee, and some seasonal personnel.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, seasonal rangers presented living history demonstrations, although many of their activities were later viewed as “not historically accurate for the homestead era” and “more reminiscent of the Appalachian hill country than prairie homesteads.” By the 1990s, the NPS had limited funding for such interpretation, and the monument began to extend the story of the Homestead Act to other regions of the country. Under Superintendent Mark Engler, a Beatrice native, the national monument dedicated the Homestead Heritage Center in 2007 with more interactive displays that treated the Homestead Act from a broader prospective, a change symbolized in part by a “Living Wall” at its entrance with a physical representation of the percentage of land successfully homesteaded in each state.