Episode Details

In May 1988 Ken Deardorff received the last land patent issued under a law Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862. This episode traces how the Homestead Acts moved about 160 million acres, nearly 10 percent of the country, to 1.6 million claimants. Earlier laws such as the Preemption Act of 1841 and Oregon's Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 set the stage, but Southern Democrats blocked a general homestead law, and President James Buchanan vetoed one in 1860. Secession removed the opposition. Settlers paid a $10 filing fee, lived on and improved 160 acres for five years, paid a final fee, and needed two neighbors to vouch for them.

Claimants included Exodusters in Kansas, Russian Jews in North Dakota, Lebanese Muslim settlers in Ross, North Dakota, who built the first mosque in the United States, and Latino settlers in Colorado, while Asian Americans were largely excluded until Wong Kim Ark in 1898. The land came largely from Native nations, and reservation holdings fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million by 1934. Later laws pushed farming onto marginal Plains land, and the plowing contributed to the Dust Bowl. Homesteading ended in 1976, except in Alaska until 1986.

• The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 targeted freedpeople, and by 1900 about a quarter of Southern Black farmers owned their farms.
• The Indian Homestead Act of 1875 required Native claimants to give up tribal identity and relations.
• The Kinkaid Act of 1904 offered 640 acres in Nebraska's Sand Hills, and the 1909 act 320 acres for dryland farming.
• In 1984 the last woman to prove up a claim in her own name took 116 acres near Big Delta, Alaska.
• An estimated 93 million Americans descend from homesteaders.