Why homestead act

To settlers, immigrants, and homesteaders, the West was empty land. To American Indians, it was home. Learn the history about how Homestead National Monument of America came to be. Every homesteading claim generated a patent sent and a written record known as a case file.

Learn how to find these records. A homesteader had to be the head of a household or at least 21 years of age to claim a acre parcel of land. Settlers from all walks of life worked to meet the challenge of "proving up". They included immigrants, farmers without land of their own, single women, and formerly enslaved people. A filing fee was the only money required, but sacrifice and hard work exacted a different price from the hopeful settlers.

Each homesteader had to live on the land, build a home, make improvements and farm to get the land. The patent they received represented the culmination of hard work and determination. Nearly four million homesteaders settled land across 30 states over years.

The Homestead Act of allowed anyone over 21 years of age or the head of a household to apply for free federal land with two simple stipulations:. Economic prosperity drew unprecedented numbers of immigrants to America, many of whom also looked westward for a new life. New canals and roadways reduced western dependence on the harbor in New Orleans, and England's repeal of its corn laws opened new markets to American agriculture.

Despite these developments, legislative efforts to improve homesteading laws faced opposition on multiple fronts. As mentioned above, Northern factories owners feared a mass departure of their cheap labor force and Southern states worried that rapid settlement of western territories would give rise to new states populated by small farmers opposed to slavery.

Preemption became national policy in spite of these sectional concerns, but supporting legislation was stymied. Three times—in , , and —the House of Representatives passed homestead legislation, but on each occasion, the Senate defeated the measure. In , a homestead bill providing Federal land grants to western settlers was passed by Congress only to be vetoed by President Buchanan.

The Civil War removed the slavery issue because the Southern states had seceded from the Union. So finally, in , the Homestead Act was passed and signed into law.

The new law established a three-fold homestead acquisition process: file an application, improve the land, and file for deed of title. Any U. Government could file an application and lay claim to acres of surveyed Government land. For the next 5 years, the General Land Office looked for a good faith effort by the homesteaders.

This meant that the homestead was their primary residence and that they made improvements upon the land. After 5 years, the homesteader could file for his patent or deed of title by submitting proof of residency and the required improvements to a local land office.

Local land offices forwarded the paperwork to the General Land Office in Washington, DC, along with a final certificate of eligibility. The case file was examined, and valid claims were granted patent to the land free and clear, except for a small registration fee.

After the Civil War, Union soldiers could deduct the time they served from the residency requirements. Some land speculators took advantage of legislative loopholes. Others hired phony claimants or bought abandoned land. The General Land Office was underfunded and unable to hire a sufficient number investigators for its widely scattered local offices. As a result, overworked and underpaid investigators were often susceptible to bribery.

Physical conditions on the frontier presented even greater challenges. Wind, blizzards, and plagues of insects threatened crops. Open plains meant few trees for building, forcing many to build homes out of sod. Limited fuel and water supplies could turn simple cooking and heating chores into difficult trials. Ironically, even the smaller size of sections took its own toll.

A shortage of investigators also allowed false claims to be approved. And unpredictable weather, water shortages and remoteness led many homesteaders to abandon their claims well before the five-year mark. But with improvements in rail lines and growing populations, new towns and states were created. Homesteading virtually came to a screeching halt with the enactment of the Taylor Grazing Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in , which regulated grazing on federal public lands and authorized the U.

Secretary of the Interior to apportion grazing districts. Bureau of Land Management to manage federal lands. Homesteading was still allowed for another decade in Alaska, until In , a Vietnam veteran and native Californian named Kenneth Deardorff filed a homestead claim on 80 acres of land on the Stony River in southwestern Alaska.

After fulfilling all the requirements of the act and living and working on the land for over a decade, Deardorff received his patent in May He was the last person to receive the title to land claimed under the Civil War-era act. Why the tiny midwest town? But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Tea Act of was one of several measures imposed on the American colonists by the heavily indebted British government in the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War The Stamp Act of was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British Parliament.

The act, which imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years' War and