Did Improving the Lot Improve the Lots of the People? Evaluating the Economic Mobility from the Homestead Act

Abstract

The Homestead Act provided a clear path for bona fide settlers to receive “free” land by making improvements to a 160-acre quarter-section of land and occupying it for five years. Replete with implications for government revenues, settlement patterns, and securing sovereignty of the vast frontier, the central tenet of the debate preceding the Act’s passage pertained to the landless poor’s opportunity to improve their conditions. By the end of the homesteading era circa 1940, some 1.6 million applications were processed, transferring 270 million acres to private citizens. Despite being the largest land redistribution effort on record, little direct evidence exists on how it fared in delivering on its promise of upward economic mobility. In this paper we humbly begin this assessment by asking how homesteaders in Colorado differed from settlers that secured their land by direct cash purchase and detailing our ongoing efforts to provide a more complete answer. Our preliminary results provide little evidence that successful homesteaders found any upward mobility relative to those that secured their land with cash. In fact, the evidence suggests that homesteading decreased upward economic mobility relative to other land-owning peers. Prior to claiming land, homesteaders appear slightly worse off than those cash-purchasers, but appear to become substantially worse off following homesteading, with a small but incomplete recovery over the next two decades.