Members of many North Dakota families - those on the farm and in town - can lead you down gravel roads and section lines to the original homestead. It's not the kind of thing you forget.

Occasionally, a modern farm headquarters has grown up around the building that homesteading grandparents or great-grandparents built when they arrived from back East or the old country. Then there are broken stone foundations, ringed by lilac bushes, that mark other homesteads where families moved on because of poor prices, drought, hoppers, wind or loneliness.

More than 350,000 came in two waves - 100,000 people between 1879 and 1886, before statehood, and 250,000 between 1895 and 1914.

Settlers rolled into Dakota Territory first by wagon and then by rail. They came with hope for a future. They came for land.

They came, in part, because President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. Two pages from that original document, of which there's only one copy, are on display at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck. It's a part of "Lincoln's Legacy inNorth Dakota," a part of the 16th president's national bicentennial.

Lincoln also established the Department of Agriculture. He wrote in his State of the Union address in 1862: "It will soon be prepared to distribute largely seeds, cereals, plants, and clippings, …"

The impact of Lincoln's actions upon the state's rolling prairie, home to Indian people and a small number of fur traders and merchants, was profound. Adding 350,000 people in three and a half decades to open prairie, much of it with only a thin layer of topsoil and few trees for shade or to cut the wind, was profound. It changed the landscape that the Mandan Chief Four Bears knew, that Lewis and Clark toured, from an unimpeded grassland to huge bonanza farms in the east, open-range cattle ranches in the west and every manner, shape and size of wheat and dairy farm in between.

As a part of the exhibit, visitors are encouraged to record information about their families homestead claim.

The entries are short and pithy. Jeannette Hektner Radig of Bismarck wrote about her grandparents' homestead. Martin and Andrea Hektner came to Richland County from Oslo, Norway. She wrote: "I now own the original homestead near Mooreton, N.D. that was my Grandparents. They came in 1896. The papers are signed by Pres. Grover Cleveland. They came with three small boys as Grandpa's job taking care of the King's horses couldn't support his family. Grandma was a homemaker and mid-wife for the community. Many family stories include prairie fires, blizzards and sad deaths. It is now beautiful farmland."

Michelle Lamm of Fessenden visited the exhibit and wrote about her grandfather who came from the Ukraine to western North Dakota. She wrote:"Grandfather John came over in 1907 and worked on the Northern Pacific for a few years while he took out his homestead (north side of Dunn/Stark county line, a few miles east of the Billings County line). In 1909 he sent for his wife and children. He received his certificate in March of 1915 and died of tuberculosis six weeks later. The land was taken by the bank in about 1920, after Grandma couldn't meet the mortgage. The land today is in the same family who purchased it after the foreclosure."

The Homestead Act is "so personal," said Rick Collin communications and education director of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, "It affected family histories. It's a highly valuable, rare document."