Homestead Act
Settler land grant
The Homestead Act was an 1862 U.S. law granting 160 acres of public land to settlers who farmed and improved it for five years.
It opened the American West to millions of homesteaders—farmers, immigrants, and formerly enslaved people—though it also accelerated displacement of Native Americans from their lands.
The term now references any similar land-distribution legislation.
- Oregon TrailEmigrant route westward
- wagon trainPioneers' covered convoy
- Great PlainsCentral North American grassland
- provingEstablishing validity through evidence
- five yearsSixty months' duration
homesteader · sod house · dirt floor · Louisiana Purchase · Manifest Destiny · squatter rights · frontier · preemption · Civil War · public domain · migration patterns · Emancipation Proclamation · surveyor · pioneer families · free land · land grant · land office · staking a claim
- 1800s AmericaOregon Trail, Trail of Tears, transcontinental railroad, Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
- American frontierfrontier, westward expansion, pioneers, homesteading, homesteads
- US HistoryAmerican Revolution, US history, Civil War, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln
- frontierfrontier, pioneer, pioneers, settlers, settler
- frontier lifehomesteaders, farmer, homesteading, shepherd, pioneer women
- frontier Americapioneers, settlers, homesteaders, homesteading, sodbusters
Homestead Actland speculation
Buying terrain for profit
enclosure movement · enclosure acts · absentee ownership · land grabbing
Homestead Actplantation system
Labor-intensive colonial farming model
serfdom · enclosure movement · feudalism · tenant farming · sharecropping
Homestead ActIndian Removal Act
Law authorizing tribal expulsion
land seizure · eminent domain · wilderness preservation · expropriation · dispossession