The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.
---Abraham Lincoln
In the aftermath of the self-inflicted horrors visited upon the United States during the Civil War, political and civic leaders focused on westward expansion and settlement as a giant relief valve for the nation's pent-up anxieties.
Samuel Olmstead served in Company D, 1st Minnesota Volunteers, Heavy Artillery, from September 1864-September 1865 with a duty station in Chattanooga, TN. His regiment lost 87 members to disease, but not a single soldier to a combat fatality. A few years after being mustered out, Samuel and his wife Sarah set out in pursuit of their version of the American dream, a farm homestead carved from the land. In 1875 they landed in a remote part of Washington Territory not far from today's city of Ellensburg, following a relative who had previously emigrated. Access was by horseback across the rugged trail more than 100 miles through Snoqualmie Pass from Puget Sound to the Kittitas Valley (roughly following the path of today's Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail). Staking their claim to 160 acres of flat, open land with deep soil beside a perennial stream, they began the process of making a home. Giant cottonwood trees were felled on the banks of the Yakima River 20 miles away, hauled to their claim, squared with an adze, dovetailed at the corners and joined with round pegs fashioned from tree branches. Sarah supplemented their income working for Samuel's half brother John at his trading post. Their three children Clara May (13), Philip (10) and Jack (4) all shared in the tasks of developing the farm. Samuel died about six years after they arrived, but Sarah and her children persevered, building a successful Jersey dairy, serving customers from Kittitas County to Seattle once the Northern Pacific Railroad was completed in 1886.
Clara May married and had two daughters, Leta May and Clareta, but died when the girls were 2 and 3 years old. Sarah raised her granddaughters; her sons gradually assumed responsibility for the farm. Neither son ever married.
Upon the passing of their uncles, Leta May and Clareta left their teaching careers and returned to run the farm for the rest of their lives. Neither woman ever married.
Upon Clareta's death at age 91, the property was gifted to Washington State Parks, to become an enduring window into the experience of 19th-century American settlers. Though the popular tours and living history demonstrations by volunteer docents were not available on our visit due to the COVID-19 safety restrictions, we were able to peek into the windows to see the wonderfully preserved rooms, tools and furnishings accumulated during three generations of farming this land by the Olmstead family.
This land, like so much of the western United States, was taken from Native Americans under duress by treaty,
then redistributed to others under a variety of land disposal laws. The land division that the Olmstead homestead is located in, a 36 square mile area designated by the official government land survey approved January 2, 1869 as Township 17 North, Range 19 East, Willamette Meridian, was distributed in a variety of ways:
1) The earliest patents were Cash Entry sales --- land sold to a claimant under a section of the Homestead Act that allowed the sale of up to 160 acres for $1.25/acre (that would be about $25/acre in 2021) after a 6-month occupancy. 19% of the township was patented under this provision.
2) The traditional Homestead Entry patents that stories like "Little House on the Prairie" have enshrined in the mythology of America's Manifest Destiny (land title to 160 acres patented after 5 years on the land with cultivation and construction of a residence; no cost beyond the $18 filing fee ($360 today) make up 28% of the township, including the Olmstead farm.
3) The Enabling Act that authorized statehood for Washington Territory in 1889 granted 2 square miles of each surveyed township to the state to support public schools, or about 6% of the township.
4) Citizens who served in the militias raised to forcibly remove tribal members from their homelands were authorized to receive patents under a provision called Scrip Warrants. Two of the patents in this township, or about 1% of the area, were issued under this authority.
5) The Desert Land Act allowed claims of up to 640 acres to persons who intended to irrigate the land. 8% of the township was claimed this way.
6) During the Great Depression a provision of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was used by three claimants to homestead another 1% of the township.
7) Far and away the largest redistribution of this part of the original Yakama territory was the Northern Pacific Land Grant, which delivered a whopping 37% of the township to the NP Railroad. All of this land was eventually sold by the railroad, an extreme example of corporate welfare given to one of the wealthiest corporations in America. The Olmsteads purchased 80 acres from the railroad to expand their farm.
Almost all of the land transactions were completed within 20 years of the government survey.
WHEREAS, a Certificate of the Register of the Land Office at Yakima, Washington, has been deposited in the General Land Office, whereby it appears that, pursuant to the Act of Congress of May 20, 1862, "To Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain,"....the claim of Sarah F. Olmstead has been established and duly consummated, in conformity to law......
NOW KNOW YE, That there is, therefore, granted by the UNITED STATES unto the said claimant the tract of Land above described; TO HAVE AND TO HOLD ....unto the said claimant and to the heirs and assigns of the said claimant forever.....IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I , Grover Cleveland, President of the United States of America, have caused these letters to be made Patent, and the Seal of the General Land Office to be hereunto affixed. ---August 18, 1888
The Olmsteads' story reflected a pattern that many of their neighbors also experienced: migration from another part of the country, generous government assistance to acquire a significant land base, the hard work of building a home and raising a family, the insecurity of growing crops in an unfamiliar and often forbidding environment, and building a sense of community with others in their shared creation. In short, a government policy created a two-decade window of opportunity for millions of people for class advancement and the creation of legacy wealth.
Here I must take a step back and look at this story in the bigger picture, as this opportunity was only functionally available to a certain subset of the US population. Slavery, and the Civil War that ended it, underpin the social and political realities of the United States to this day.
3.9 million African American slaves were freed in the aftermath of the war, 12.4% of the total US population of 31.4 million at the time. Progressive leaders of the day recognized that integration of the newly freed into the country required creating a level economic playing field for everyone. General William Tecumseh Sherman famously promised some newly freed families "40 acres and a mule." That was good policy. The federal government had gained title to thousands of acres of lands confiscated from the insurrectionists of the Confederacy under terms of the Confiscation Act of 1862. Sherman's Special Field Orders #15 stipulated that 400,000 acres of confiscated estates in the coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida be made available in 40 acre sections to African American families. Surplussed army mules could also be distributed to applicants. Had this policy been implemented throughout the states of the confederacy, just imagine what a difference it would have made in the progress of the United States! But, alas, after the assassination of President Lincoln, newly sworn-in President Andrew Johnson cancelled Sherman's orders and confiscated lands were returned to the Confederate officers and political leaders upon their sworn allegiance to the United States, ending the path toward equity that it could have fostered. A president's actions can have long-lasting consequences.....
Of course, there was another opportunity to integrate African Americans into the whole country on equal footing -- the Homestead Act. If there had been any significant attempt to encourage the entry of African American families into the program (the costs of traveling to available areas, filing fees, and acquiring farm tools and livestock were insurmountable barriers to newly freed people with no financial resources), again, imagine what differences would have resulted.
The next sad chapters of the American story, from the Black Codes, to the domestic terrorism of the KKK and lynchings, through the segregation and oppression of the Jim Crow laws, to the blatant racism of the Trump administration and the current flurry of Republican-sponsored voting suppression laws, all found their footing in the post-war appeasement of the Confederacy.
According to data from the Brookings Institution, the current median net worth of white families in the United States is 10 times the median net worth of black families!
Which leads me back to a theme that I have espoused frequently in this journey through the stories in our Washington State Parks: Now we must figure out a means toward reconciliation. If our country is to meaningfully acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement and claim the mantle of a leader in the quest for human freedom, we must create institutions in our country that will functionally establish equity between people of all races, classes, and beliefs. It is a tall order; it will involve a reordering of wealth and power status of incredible proportions. But it is not impossible. I believe that it is time to promulgate new government policy, this time to address the steps toward equity for all people of this nation.
Surely this starts with a program to address housing as a right, not a commodity-- a rejection of the colonial "idea that one should only be housed if one has enough resources to pay for it" as housing activist Jackie Fielder defines it.
For innumerable generations, the Native American communities of Washington have viewed housing as a right of every member of the community. Far-sighted idealists like the founders of the Home Colony (check out my exploration of Home Colony in the article about Cutts Island State Park), and the modern Community Land Trusts have created working models of this shared vision.
Perhaps this time, the means toward providing that path toward equity can be created with a just means of sourcing the underpinning wealth, unlike the Homestead Act's removal of tribal nations from their lands. A wealth tax levied on Americans who have accrued the greatest gains from legacy wealth generated by previous policies such as slavery, corporate welfare such as the railroad grants and other redistributions of Native American lands seems a very good place to start.
-David
Olmstead Place State Park is established on the lands of the Yakama Nation appropriated under duress by the Treaty of 1855 between the Yakama and the US Government, and transferred to Sarah Olmstead and her heirs by patent under the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862.
