On May 20, 1862 (162 years ago yesterday), President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act.
Under this legislation, an adult citizen could lay claim to 160 acres of government land. If they then built a house, cultivated the land, and lived there for five years, they would receive a deed to the property. This ultimately opened up millions of acres of land to western settlers, helping to grow the country and the economy.
This bill was passed during the Civil War after southern states seceded from the Union. Prior to this, proposals for a Homestead Act were blocked in Congress by southerners who feared that new land settled in this way would lead to more free states and thereby weaken the slave-holding interests of the South. But with southern legislators out of Congress, Lincoln and Republicans took advantage of an opportunity to pass the legislation.
Lincoln, of course, knew a thing or two about living and farming in the West. The above photo is a replica of the log cabin at Knob Creek, Kentucky, that was Lincoln’s childhood home and where he lived from the age of about two to seven.
His family later moved to Indiana, where they once again cleared and settled new land. As an adult, Lincoln moved to New Salem and then to Springfield, Illinois, where he became a lawyer. But his childhood left him well acquainted with the hardscrabble life of those pioneers who strived to forge new lives in what were then America’s western territories.
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