© by Richard Pence
Background: The passage of the Homestead Act by Congress in 1862 was the culmination of more than 70 years of
controversy over the disposition of public lands.
From the inception of the United States there was a clamor
for ever-increasing liberalism in the disposition of these lands. From 1830 onward, groups called for free distribution
of such lands. This became a demand of the Free-Soil party, which saw such distribution as a means of stopping
the spread of slavery into the territories, and it was subsequently adopted by the Republican party in its 1860
platform. The Southern states had been the most vociferous opponents of the policy, and their secession cleared
the way for its adoption.
The Act, which became law on Jan. 1, 1863, allowed anyone to file for a quarter-section of free land (160 acres).
The land was yours at the end of five years if you had built a house on it, dug a well, broken (plowed) 10 acres,
fenced a specified amount, and actually lived there. Additionally, one could claim a quarter-section of land by
"timber culture" (commonly called a "tree claim"). This required that you plant and successfully cultivate 10
acres of timber.
The Homesteaders
New arrivals to the U.S. and landless citizens were obvious candidates for the homestead lands;
however, rather than the
established farmer, the homesteaders were more likely to be his children seeking a place of their own. My
great-grandfather, who was orphaned at an early age, left Maine as a youth and went to Kansas where he proved up
one homestead and then returned to Maine, married and went to South Dakota and proved up on a homestead in
the 1880s. His ancestors had been in New England since 1630; descendants still live on the homestead.
My paternal grandfather had three second cousins who were born into a large family in Iowa. The three, one a
woman, went to North Dakota together and proved up on adjoining homesteads. As well as being a
homesteader, she was the school teacher in the township.
As a youth in South Dakota I knew families whose patriarchs came from Norway, Germany and Finland to
homestead there. And in this far northern South Dakota area there was a Black man, said to be the son of a slave,
who proved up a homestead which he later sold and then moved to a job in town. (He is buried in the local
cemetery in a grave marked by a large monument paid for by fund raisers of the ladies' aid society!) Some, like
the third husband of my paternal grandmother's mother, in effect worked for land speculators. He took out a
homestead (in a rather arid, godforsaken area near the Missouri River) in the 1890s, fairly shortly thereafter
mortgaged it with an Iowa insurance company (which apparently loaned him a little more each year) - and as
soon as he "proved up" and received his final certificate, he turned it over to the company and moved on. Such
companies often acquired large tracts in this fashion. Meanwhile, those on the homesteads lived off the mortgage
and what little they could eke from the land.
By the way, there appears to have been "fudging" on the five-year requirement. In the case of both my great-grandfather
Stanley and my great-grandmother's husband, the time from the filing of the initial pre-emption to the date of the
final certificate was less than five years, more like four.
Although it remained in effect, with numerous modifications, until repealed in 1977, the Homestead Act was not
an unqualified success. The better lands soon came under the control of the railroads and speculators, forcing
settlers to buy from them rather than accept the poorer government lands. Even so, by 1900 about 600,000
farmers had received clear title under the act to lands covering about 80 million acres
Locating Homestead Records
At the time I did my research for homestead records, one needed to know the legal description of the land before
the records could be located. That is, section number, township number and range number as they were recorded
in that fashion. If you knew the county you could cut down considerably on how much you had to search. If you
knew the township, even less searching was required. However, there has been quite a bit of
indexing of the land office records since that time and record indexes for most of public land states
east of the Mississippi are now available
on CD-ROM. In addition to the particulars of each claim, the CD-ROMs contain the necessary reference
numbers that you can use to get copies of the
actual records. For further information, contact
Bureau of Land Management
Eastern States
Attn: Public Services Section
7450 Boston Boulevard
Springfield VA 22153
(Note that there is generally little information of a
genealogical nature in federal land records; however, the record for my great grandfather, Daniel Adelbert
Stanley, contained a list of his children with their ages.)
Further Reading
Hibbard, Benjamin, A History of the Public Land Policies, 1965
This article copyright to Richard A. Pence and may not be used without the author's permission
Richard Pence's webpage: http://www.pipeline.com/~richardpence/
Richard Pence's Biography: http://www.pipeline.com/~richardpence/family.htm
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