Digitizing Paths to Discovery: The Black Homesteading Project

A class of Sunday school students at Blackdom Baptist Church in Blackdom, a Black homesteader colony in New Mexico. NPS photo.

Since the creation of the United States as a nation, debate flourished over the distribution of public domain and demands for not only wealthy speculators but also independent farmers to settle public lands. Homesteading gained momentum with the Preemption Act of 1841 and peppered individual Congressmen’s proposed bills in the 1850s. After the secession of the South in 1861 and the eruption of the Civil War, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862. A volunteer project to transcribe these records is shedding light on these settlers' experiences.

The Homestead Act’s inclusivity outdid earlier land-grant laws like the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. The Homestead Act did not include gendered language or any provision mentioning race. Additionally, a homestead claimant did not need to be an American citizen to start the process. These expansions invited any head of household or individual over the age of 21 to apply for a 160-acre parcel of land that the US had acquired from Indigenous nations through war, treaty negotiations, and allotment.

A potential homesteader needed only $12 to file a homestead claim. The claim did not give them ownership but the opportunity to try to earn the land for free. A homesteader had to live on the land for at least five years without leaving for more than a few weeks at a time. They also had to cultivate a crop to improve the land and build their own shelter.

Photograph of the Daniel Freeman homestead, the first homestead claim in the US. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The enormity of a claimant’s task did not end there. Once ready to finalize their claim, a homesteader had to “prove up” their claim—that is, they had to prove they met all of the act’s stipulations. They had to name four witnesses to swear to their accomplishments, and they had to put forth a public notice of their intentions. The resulting paperwork constitutes a homestead case file.

The Homestead Act facilitated the rapid settlement of territories in the Western and Midwestern US until it was repealed in 1976 for the lower 48 states. Fields of neat crops now replace once-abundant prairie grass. Homesteaders’ clamor for efficient equipment also yielded advancements in hay mowers, manure spreaders, plows, and other technologies, and entire communities arose in areas that had been largely untouched by American settlers.

The Homestead Act allotted 270 million acres of land across 30 states. Homesteading is not only a national narrative but a landmark in the personal stories of countless everyday Americans. As of 2007, an estimated 93,000,000 homesteader descendants are alive today. One of Homestead National Historical Park’s ongoing projects, the Black Homesteading Project, encourages these descendants and fellow community members to transcribe homesteading case files that inform current generations as much as they once guided African American homesteaders.

Sowing the Seeds for the Black Homesteading Project

Homesteading exploded among African Americans following the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which changed the legal status of millions of African Americans to free. A multigenerational quest for land and a rhetoric of possibility, industry, and equality enticed Black homesteaders to try their hand at settling the American West, particularly Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Since 2019, Homestead National Historical Park has partnered with the University of Nebraska’s Center for Great Plain Studies to bring both the hopes and tragedies of these families’ stories—in Black homesteaders’ own voices—to the public forefront. This early collaboration focuses on Oklahoma, where 6,000 African Americans already resided before the homesteading movement.

The historic home of Zachary T. Fletcher, built in 1880 in Nicodemus, Kansas. NPS photo.

As an extension of that study, the University of Oklahoma joined the NPS and the Center for Great Plains Studies in 2021 to examine connections between land ownership, citizenship, and upward mobility for African Americans, many of whom had been recently enslaved. The entanglement of migration and racism made the experience of Black homesteaders particularly fragile, but transcribing case files illuminates defiantly positive trends. Early Black homesteading communities exhibited high political participation at the local and state/territorial level. They entered freed-up land not just to prove up their claims but to actively embed themselves within larger communities. Other Black communities, including church congregations, groups of friends, and French-speaking minorities, even migrated together to set down new roots alongside the old.

One can recognize that homesteading accounts are personal in scope as well as contributive to the United States’ national narrative. Homestead National Historical Park invites not just park and project personnel but also volunteers and descendants of Black homesteaders to engage with homesteading records.

Volunteering That Forges Connections

Spurred by her own discovery of a Black homesteading ancestor in Louisiana, genealogist and NPS volunteer Bernice Bennett has activated a growing grassroots movement. In addition to personally contributing over 350 hours to the Black Homesteading Project, Bennett mentored 29 contributors, most of them homesteader descendants, who collectively wrote 91 stories with over 1000 pages of primary source documentation. From her home in Maryland, Bennett frequently travels to the National Archives to retrieve Black homesteaders’ documentation and make them available to park staff.

Volunteers need only a word processor and an internet connection, mixed with patience and passion, to enhance historically occluded stories. In 2023 alone, the Virtual Volunteering Team—consisting of over 200 individuals from the United States and abroad—transcribed more than 5,000 pages of documentation. A brief guide and a compilation of form templates helps standardize transcriptions, which are reviewed by peers and park staff before they are published online. Volunteers have also photographed landscapes in the 30 homesteading states for website and social media use, created databases of potential partner organizations, and performed archival research of individual homesteaders.

Homestead Certificate No. 5887 Application #9590 for Peter Clark, a Black Louisiana homesteader. NPS photo.

The process occasionally bears surprises. Case files feature the sworn affidavits of homesteaders and affidavits of two of four potential witnesses, which address topics like the kinds of crops planted and the structures built. Case files also include naturalization papers, as only naturalized citizens could finalize their claim. Marks, signatures, and explanations often written in claimants’ and witnesses’ own hands offer a human touch to otherwise generic forms. Race, however, is not explicitly recorded on homestead land entry case files, so researchers often must cross-reference genealogical records, census records, and other historical documents.

One completed story spotlights Lucinda Tann Stone, a Black woman who immigrated from Buxton, Canada at the age of 21. By age 28, with three children—Ada, Clinton, and Ida—Lucinda proudly reported crops of corn, wheat, and oats; the addition of a 56-foot deep well, six fruit trees, a sod stable, and a granary; and livestock, machinery, and furniture that rounded out the farm. She never signed over or added her husband Elijah to the deed. Joyceann Gray, the great-granddaughter of William P. Walker, one of Lucinda’s witnesses, wrote this contribution. Doing so put her in touch with a community of researchers—some of whom proved to be her own relatives.

Another entry preserves the bravery of a couple in search of acceptance. Charles Meehan, a man of Jewish and German heritage, met and fell in love with Hester Catherine Freeman, a Black woman, in Ontario’s Elgin Settlement. Between 1879 and 1884, they and their three young children followed neighboring families into Nebraska—a state where interracial marriage was illegal. A few decades later, their settlement of 1,912 acres earned the name “Meehan Grove” for its abundance of forest trees, fruit trees, and small fruit bushes. Catherine Meehan Blount, the youngest of forty-four grandchildren born to Charles and Hester Meehan, contributed this article as a testament to the strength of their community and the tolerance that flourished in pockets of the frontier.

Charles and Hester Freeman Meehan with their children and the 11 oldest of 44 grandchildren in front of their sod house in Nebraska, in 1913. Courtesy of Catherine Meehan Blount.

Not every Black homesteader’s story was successful like the Tanns’ or the Meehans’, nor does every established community of Black homesteaders exist to this day. But the Black Homesteading Project is one critical step in honoring all homesteaders for the lives their labor built.

To learn more about the Black Homesteading Project and to apply, visit: Volunteer Opportunity Detail.

To learn about all of Homestead National Historical Park’s Volunteer Opportunities, visit: Volunteer - Homestead National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov).

To learn about the Black Homesteading Project, visit: Black Homesteaders - Homestead National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov).

References

Learn about the Oklahoma Black Homesteader Project. National Park Service.

National Genealogical Society Awards Homestead National Historical Park. National Park Service, 2023.

Oklahoma’s Black Homesteaders. Uploaded by Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 9 Nov 2022.