This week in Beatrice
About Beatrice
Beatrice grew up where an old trail forded the Big Blue River, settled in 1857 by a band of travelers who had met while their steamboat sat stuck on the Missouri, and named for 17-year-old Julia Beatrice Kinney. Just after midnight on New Year's Day 1863, the morning the Homestead Act took effect, Daniel Freeman talked a clerk into opening the land office so he could claim a quarter section west of town, and his is counted as the first homestead filing. His land is now Homestead National Historical Park, with a one-room schoolhouse and the oldest restored tallgrass prairie in the park system. In town, the 1906 Burlington depot holds the county museum and an old rail line has become a trail running south to Kansas.