Homestead Act

noun

1. a special act of Congress (1862) that made public lands in the West available to settlers without payment, usually in lots of 160 acres, to be used as farms.

Homestead Act

noun

1. an act passed by the US Congress in 1862 making available to settlers 160-acre tracts of public land for cultivation
2. (in Canada) a similar act passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1872

Homestead Act

1. A law passed in the 1860s that offered up to 160 acres of public land to any head of a family who paid a registration fee, lived on the land for five years, and cultivated it or built on it.

Example Sentences

The Homestead Act gave 160 acres to the adult head of a household provided they improved the land with farming and ranching and stayed there for five years.

From Seattle Times

As just one example, Jackson cites the Homestead Act of 1862, which was created to provide “free” acreage in the western territory of the country and actually stole Indigenous land while making it “exceedingly unlikely” for Black people to benefit.

From Scientific American

One campaign adviser compared the proposal’s ambition to the “Opportunity Zones” economic incentives in Trump’s 2017 tax legislation, scaled up to emulate historic Republican achievements such as Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System.

From Washington Post

It's there in the pioneer stories of how a bunch of brave men settled the West, but even there they were benefiting from the Homestead Act of 1862, where mostly white men got these parcels of land that were essentially taken from Indigenous people.

From Salon

They've been left out of the GI Bill, they were left out of the Homestead Act.

From Salon