Photograph of the Daniel Freeman Homestead in Gage County , Nebraska , 1904 . This was the first homestead claim under the 1862 Homestead Act .
Even as states and private parties throughout the country were building roads and canals , they must have been aware of the new form of transportation that was emerging as early as 1830 . In that year , the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad made its first trip of 13 miles from downtown Baltimore to the thriving mill town of Ellicott Mills ( now Ellicott City ), Maryland . The earliest example of a government land grant for a railroad occurred in 1833 when Congress gave the Illinois and Michigan Canal Company the right to use some of its land grant for a railroad instead of a canal — a right it chose not to exercise .
The formal era of railroad land grants began with the passage of The Land Grant Act of 1850 . Congress granted the states of Illinois , Alabama and Mississippi a total of 3.75 million acres to be used by three separate railroad companies to construct more than 1,200 miles of track to connect Chicago , Illinois with Mobile , Alabama . The terms of the grants paralleled those of the canal grants . Each grant was made in alternate sections of land spanning specific distances on both sides of the right-of-way . The government planned to sell adjoining checkerboard sections at specified minimum prices . The railroads , like the canals , were required to transport mail and other government property at reduced rates . During the next seven years , Presidents Millard Fillmore and
Franklin Pierce signed laws granting nine more Midwestern and Southern states another 28 million acres of land to support the construction of 40 railroad lines crisscrossing their territories .
President Abraham Lincoln , a former railroad lawyer , was a strong proponent of a transcontinental railroad route . In July 1862 , he signed the Pacific Railroad Act . It created the Union Pacific Railroad and authorized that company to begin building a railroad westward from a yet-tobe-determined site on the Missouri River to the California / Nevada border . It further directed the already existing Central Pacific Railroad to begin building a road eastward from Sacramento , California to that same border . The law granted the two railroad companies more than 44 million acres of land to support their efforts . With the precedent well-established , during the next 10 years Congress granted more than 84 million acres of land to 55 additional companies , thus bringing the total amount of land granted the railroads to approximately 130 million acres .
Land Grants for Homesteaders
In 1862 , Congress followed through on a long-standing idea of granting public domain land to individuals . A series of Preemption Acts passed from 1813 to 1841 had allocated to several new states more than five million acres of public domain land they could use to grant so-called “ squatters ’ rights ” to the earliest settlers of those parcels . The Homestead Act of 1862 and its successors followed through on officials ’ desires to allow greater numbers of individuals and families to settle newly admitted states in the Midwest and West as quickly and easily as possible . They permitted almost anyone over 21 who was a United States citizen and who had not taken up arms against the federal government to receive 160 acres of land . The recipient had to promise to live on the land , improve it and farm it for at least five years . By the end of the 19th century , homesteading laws and other federal acts granting mineral or timber rights enabled the government to distribute more than 90 million acres of free land to those willing to help accelerate the settlement of the country .
Land Grants for Educational Institutions
The federal government began requiring new states to set aside land for elementary schools as early as 1787 . During the first third of the 19th century , it made Enabling Act grants for the establishment of different types of public schools , including so-called “ normal ” schools to train teachers . In the mid-1850s , several educators recognized the need for a new type of
34 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2020 | www . MoAF . org