160 acres for free
by Maxine
No, not today, unfortunately. Would that it were so! On May 20, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed The Homestead Act. If settlers paid $10 and agreed to live on a piece of land for five years, they were given 160 acres for free. By 1900, homesteaders had claimed 80 million acres. The parents of novelist Willa Cather and children's book author Laura Ingalls Wilder both took advantage of the offer, moving to Nebraska and North Dakota. To find out more about how the act affected the settlement of the West, check out some of the Library's books on westward expansion as well as Cather's luminous descriptions of the Old West and Wilder's portraits of a loving family.
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