Answer:
the Cabinet departments
Explanation:
The Cabinet of the United States is a body consisting of the vice president of the United States and the heads of the executive branch's federal executive departments in the federal government of the United States, which is regarded as the principal advisory body to the president of the United States. The president is not formally a member of the Cabinet. The heads of departments, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, are members of the Cabinet, and acting department heads also sit at the Cabinet meetings whether or not they have been officially nominated for Senate confirmation. The president may designate heads of other agencies and non-Senate-confirmed members of the Executive Office of the President as Cabinet-level members of the Cabinet.
In short, they're the direct advisors of the President.
I will assume you mean the Homestead Act of 1862, which was the first and most iconic one. In that case, the requirements were that the homesteader, the one filing the claim, be either the head of the household OR twenty-one years old, they had to live only on the designated land, build a home, improve it, and farm the land for five years, and, finally, they had to be a United States citizen that had never taken up arms against America.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, farm girls and young women from throughout New England were recruited to work in the textile factories in Lowell, Massachusetts.