To learn about Nebraska homesteads, I had to learn something new from Towner County, North Dakota’s Clerk of Court, Jolene Hoffert. Her office was terrific in looking up all kinds of land records for my McGee ancestors. When they found everything they could, Jolene told me to use the homestead paperwork she pulled to get more information at the National Archives. I thought the paper I got from the Bureau of Land Management (for the states they have scanned) and the ones from Towner County was all the information there was. Jolene told me to contact the National Archives and pay a fee ($5 when she last did this), and you could get all the information that was collected to “prove” the homestead. Well, that was interesting, but when I first checked at NARA, I saw that homestead packages were $50. Indeed a rise in price since Jolene last pulled data from them on homesteads! But the data is tempting. So I recheck the NARA website and pay a little more attention — there is a notice that some of the homestead packages are on Fold3.com. Since I already have a subscription to Fold3, I took a look. They only have homestead records from Nebraska, but since I have ancestors who homesteaded in Nebraska, this was a big bonus.
I pulled the records for Enoch Parr’s homestead in Oak Grove Township (between Bloomington, NE, and Kansas state line). There were 34 pages of documents – routine, confusing, fascinating. I had to study history again to figure some of it out.
So we have the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed pretty much any adult the opportunity to earn 160 acres of free land by building a house on it, living there, and then farming some portion of it for 5 years. If you succeeded, Uncle Sam gave you the deed to the land for a fee of about $18. Well, in Nebraska, there were multiple governing Acts. In addition to the Homestead Act, there was the Preemption Act of 1841. I don’t know what they did in other states, but those Nebraska homesteaders worked every angle. The Preemptive Act of 1841 allowed people to “squat” on public land and attempt to build a home and farm. Before the government could offer the property for sale to someone else, they had to offer it first to the “squatters” for $1.25/acre. So if they staked a claim under the Preemptive Act and couldn’t meet all the Homestead Act requirements, they could buy the land. If they could meet the Homestead Act requirements, they would file a “Pre-emption-Homestead Affidavit” that converted the claim from Preemptive to Homestead and only pay filing fees. Enoch Parr did convert his land from Preemptive to Homestead, but more on that another day.
