About Homestead National Historical Park
Homestead National Historical Park sits on the quarter section about five miles west of Beatrice, in Gage County, where Daniel Freeman filed one of the very first claims under the Homestead Act at the Brownville, Nebraska land office on January 1, 1863. The National Park Service unit was created as Homestead National Monument of America on March 19, 1936, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, and renamed Homestead National Historical Park on January 13, 2021. It covers 211 acres and recorded 43,099 visitors in 2025.
The park's subject is the 1862 act itself and what it set in motion. The law invited families, single women, immigrants and formerly enslaved people to claim free land, and over the following decades more than ten percent of the land area of the United States passed into private hands this way. The park presents both sides of that history: the migration, labor and risk taken on by homesteaders, and the permanent displacement of the Indigenous nations who had lived on the land. The plow-shaped Homestead Heritage Center, dedicated in 2007, holds the main exhibits on immigration, agriculture and land policy and looks out over the oldest restored tallgrass prairie in the National Park System, a 100-acre restoration under management for more than 60 years. The Homestead Education Center displays historic farm implements from the park's collections.
Two historic structures anchor the grounds. The Palmer-Epard Cabin, a 14-by-16-foot hardwood cabin built in 1867 and preserved in its original condition, is open for visitors to step inside; it is also pictured on a U.S. quarter honoring the park. The Freeman School, a brick one-room schoolhouse in use from 1872 to 1967, was the longest continuously operating one-room school in Nebraska. Trails cross the prairie and connect the buildings.
Collections and Research Services
For genealogists the park's most useful service is its guidance on homestead land records. Every completed claim generated a land entry case file, now held by the National Archives, that records how the claimant proved up the land. The park's Research Homestead Land Records page explains how to locate and order these files, and visitors who obtain an ancestor's records are invited to write up the family's story and submit it to the park's repository of homestead stories. Educational videos and Junior Ranger materials are online as well. Our guide to free family history research covers the federal land-patent search that is the usual first step before requesting a case file.
Planning Your Visit
There is no entrance fee at Homestead. The park is at 8523 West State Highway 4, Beatrice, NE 68310, and the phone number is (402) 223-3514. Both the Heritage Center and the Education Center offer free public Wi-Fi. Operating hours follow summer and winter schedules that are posted on the park's hours page, so check nps.gov/home before you go; the special events calendar lists ranger programs through the year. The state's main research collections are about 40 miles north at the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln.
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