Across this footbridge you can walk through 100 acres of restored tallgrass prairie. As each year passes, this piece of ground will look more and more like what Daniel Freeman saw when he laid claim to a 160-acre homestead here in 1863.
As you explore ahead, keep in mind the brutal challenges of this prairie. How could simple tools and hard work overcome blizzards, prairie fires, tornadoes, plagues of grasshoppers, and a host of other calamities?
Yet despite these harsh realities, millions of people flooded the land in 30 states to carve out a better life. Through the Homestead Act families, immigrants, single women, ex-soldiers, freed slaves, and fortune seekers settled ten percent of all the land in the United States. Their hard work changed America forever.
Gaze across all that tall grass and ask yourself, "What would I have done first?"
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