My family and I just got back from an extended road trip. And one of our first stops on that road trip was Homestead National Historic Park in Nebraska. It was actually our second time visiting and, seriously, if you get the chance to visit, you absolutely should. (It’s only about an hour and a half from Winter Quarters.)
The Homestead Act was fascinating. Signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, it allowed heads of household or anyone over 21 to claim a 160-acre parcel of land, provided they were, or intended to become, a citizen.[fn1] To get the land, a homesteader had to live on the land for five years, built a home, make improvements to the land, and farm it. At the end of five years, for only the cost of a filing fee, a successful homesteader would own the land.
The Homestead Act encouraged the settlement of a significant portion of the Midwest and the West. Roughly 10% of the land of the U.S. was claimed under these provisions. Of course, it’s not like the land was uninhabited before homesteaders staked their claims, and the Park doesn’t gloss over the harm it did to Native Americans or, for that matter, to the environment, as farmers tore up prairie and cut down forests.
Still, it’s a fascinating and important part of U.S. history (happy Fourth of July to our U.S. readers!), one that is, at least in my educational experience, largely overlooked.
And it’s a not-insignificant part of Mormon history.
See, Utah had almost 17,000 homesteaders that proved-up their claims. I assume not all of them were Mormon, but some were. At our visit, the Ranger pointed us to some computers with access to a Bureau of Land Management website that allows people to search for homestead records. I did a quick search and discovered that Charles A. Brunson, my great-great-grandfather, successfully got 160 acres in Millard County, Utah, in 1915 after (I presume) homesteading it for 5 years.
I may well have other ancestors who also homesteaded in Utah (and I’ll probably look at some point), but the point of a vacation where I didn’t bring my computer was not to spend a ton of time sitting on computers at an NPS site, so I then did a quick search and discovered that at least one of my wife’s (non-Mormon) ancestors also successfully homesteaded in Wisconsin.
At that point, we enjoyed the rest of the displays and farming tools and cabins and other things the site had to offer. (Seriously, you should go!)
The Homestead Act did significant work in creating the United States we have today. And that work did not exclude the Mormons.
If you discover you had ancestors who homesteaded, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
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[fn1] Which included women, immigrants, and formerly-enslaved persons.
Image from Shelly. CC BY 2.0.
Source: bycommonconsent.com
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