Homestead Act

The Homestead Act is a piece of U.S legislation which gave 160 acres (one quarter of a section of a township) of undeveloped land in the western United States to any family head provided he lived on it for five years, or allowed the family head to buy it for $1.25 per acre after six months. The act was signed into law by President Lincoln on May 20, 1862. The first claim under the Homestead Act was made for a farm in Nebraska on January 1, 1863.

As Frontier moved west onto the arid Great Plains the amount of land a homesteader was allowed to claim was changed to 640 acres, a full section. Although a few isolated pockets remained into the 1950s most land in the lower 48 states had been taken up by 1910 or so. Homesteading continued on a small scale in Alaska. Much of the remaining public domain was included in the National Forests or is administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

In Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado homesteading cut into the access of the large ranches to the public domain where hundreds of thousands of cattle were grazed upon the open range, a practice called free grazing. The ranchers fought back by themselves (or their cowboys) homesteading prime spots which gave access to water. At times tensions escalated into violence, conflicts called range wars, for example, the Johnson County War in Wyoming.

The act was later copied with some modifications by Canada in the form of the Dominion Lands Act, and similar acts, usually termed the Selection Acts were passed in the various Australian colonies in the 1860s, beginning in 1861 in New South Wales.