Homestead Act of 1862

The Homestead Act of 1862 was a federal statute that regulated most federal transfers of land to Arkansans after the Civil War. It required two things of homesteaders: settlement and cultivation. In other words, homesteaders had to live on and farm their land, and, in exchange, they received land at a very low cost. These land transfers comprised more than eight million Arkansas acres, nearly a quarter of the state’s land, for nearly 75,000 applicants. Just about half (4,037,291 acres of 8,133,791 acres) was transferred in the twentieth century. As the railroads made more of Arkansas accessible, more and more Arkansans homesteaded land. In contrast to the Southern Homestead Act—which was in force during the Reconstruction years only from 1866 until 1876 and intended to reward men loyal to the United States with public lands in states that had seceded during the Civil War—the 1862 Homestead Act resulted in land transfers in Arkansas well into the twentieth century.

Before the Civil War, the federal government used public lands to generate revenue for itself, to support public schools (through the sale of Section 16 in each congressional township), and to support railroads. During the Civil War, Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act, intended to incentivize the settlement of the West. (At about the same time, Arkansas passed a law purportedly allowing it to sell the U.S. government’s land for itself.) After the Civil War, both established Arkansans and newcomers took advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire their own land. (Land in the five southern public land grant states, including Arkansas, was not generally available to non-loyal would-be homesteaders until 1868.)

It took time for Arkansans to take advantage of the Homestead Act. The first successful homestead claims in Arkansas (eleven claims totaling 825 acres) were not recorded until 1871. In 1880, the federal government owned ninety percent of the land in northern Howard and southern Polk counties, and still owned seventy-five percent in 1900 (about five years after the Kansas City Southern Railway’s arrival).

Under the 1862 Homestead Act, farmers could acquire up to 160 acres in exchange for committing their time and what the government considered a small amount of money ($14 to enter a claim plus additional fees for affidavits and perfecting the claim and advertisements), building a house, and cultivating a percentage of the land. Although specifics changed over time, a claimant was expected to live on (“settle”) and farm the land (“cultivate”) without significant absences for five years (reduced to three years by the Homestead Act of 1912), and then to “prove up”—prove they had met the requirements—within seven years after filing a claim. These homestead claims were for land that the federal government had not managed to sell previously—either because nobody wanted to buy it or because, in the case of the western territories, it had not been surveyed and made available for purchase.

Based on a study of homesteaders in the western Ouachita Mountains in southern Polk and northern Howard counties, most Arkansas homesteaders already had ties to the area where they settled. Some claimants had lived on their land for decades before formalizing their stake, while others returned to settle on land near where they had grown up. They usually had relatives nearby to help in settlement and cultivation. Marriage often served as the apparent trigger for filing a homestead claim. These characteristics appear to be similar for both Black and white homesteading Arkansans.

Nearly every homestead claimant’s household included a woman, usually the claimant’s wife, but sometimes the claimant herself. Although a homesteading household was usually headed by a married man, about ten percent of successful claimants were women, including single women, widows, and women who had been deserted by their husbands. Considerably fewer were single men. The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), charged with implementing the law, created special rules for women who had become single during the proving-up period, whether through their husband’s death, desertion, or divorce. In 1886, the DOI held, “Upon the death of a husband and protector, it might, and in many cases would, be impossible, by reason of ill health, remoteness from neighbors, natural timidity, poverty, or other causes, for the widow to remain upon land which had been entered by her husband and resided upon by him and her.” These newly single women were allowed to waive the “settlement” portion of the requirements so long as they arranged for someone to cultivate the land. Women who had filed claims as single women, however, were required to live on the land.

The coming of the Civil War created an opportunity for the U.S. Congress to pass the Homestead Act. Previously, some Northern members of Congress had worried that cheap immigrant labor would be lured away from mills and factories by the prospect of owning property in the West, while Southern members had worried that homesteading might shift more power to non-slave-owning yeoman farmers.

Arkansans were relatively slow to take advantage of the Homestead Act. The infrastructure required—from land offices, newspapers to publish the claim notices, and access to the land—had to be rebuilt after the Civil War. In some areas, new infrastructure, such as railroads, incentivized homesteading. In other areas, homesteaders claimed overlooked bits of land still owned by the federal government in long-settled regions. Once homesteading began in an area, it often accelerated rapidly.

Nearly 75,000 Arkansans (and their families) took advantage of this law to acquire nearly a quarter of Arkansas’s land. Arkansas memoirs and county histories frequently refer to homesteading as a path to home ownership. Despite this, the national impression of homesteading is of men going to strange lands in the West and staking their claims, including Pa Ingalls in the Little House on the Prairie series.

For additional information:
“An Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain (May 22, 1862).” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/homestead-act (accessed April 16, 2024).

Childs, Lisa C. “‘I Know How to Farm’: Women Homesteaders in the Ouachita Foothills.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly (Summer 2022): 127–156.

Edwards, Richard, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo. Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

“Homestead Act of 1862.” In Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, edited by Thomas Riggs. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2015.

“Homesteads.” Department of the Interior. Washington DC: Bureau of Land Management, 1961.

U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Official Federal Land Records Site. https://glorecords.blm.gov/default.aspx (accessed April 16, 2024).

Lisa C. Childs
Fayetteville, Arkansas