History of Land Ownership within the United States.

1830 —

Seizure.

Land ownership in the United States begins with dispossession. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the federal government to force Native nations from ancestral land east of the Mississippi, clearing it for sale and settlement. The removals that followed — including the Cherokee removal remembered as the Trail of Tears — were carried out under federal order, not incidental to it.

Later in the century, the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up land held communally by tribal nations into individual allotments, then opened whatever acreage remained — declared "surplus" by the government doing the declaring — to non-Native settlement. Between the Dawes Act and its reversal in 1934, tribal landholding fell by roughly two-thirds.

Slavery era

Enslavement and exclusion.

For the roughly two and a half centuries slavery was legal in what became the United States, enslaved Black people were themselves classified as property, not owners of it. Free Black people existed in every state before emancipation, but faced a patchwork of laws restricting their ability to buy, hold, or pass down land — barriers that varied by state but narrowed toward the same result.

1865 —

Reconstruction's broken promise.

In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside roughly 400,000 acres of confiscated coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for freed families in 40-acre allotments — the origin of the phrase "40 acres." Tens of thousands of freed people settled the land that year.

Later that year, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order and restored the land to its former Confederate owners. The Freedmen's Bureau, created to assist the transition from slavery, was left largely without the land redistribution power that would have given emancipation an economic foundation. The promise was made and documented. It was also, within the year, undone.

1881 —

Frederick Douglass, Recorder of Deeds.

In 1881, President James Garfield appointed Frederick Douglass Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia — the office responsible for maintaining the official record of property transfers in the capital. Douglass was the first Black man to hold the office; the office itself had existed for decades before his appointment. He served until 1886.

The appointment placed a man born into slavery, who by law had once been barred from owning himself, in charge of the government's record of who owned what. It did not, on its own, open land ownership to the broader Black population — that record runs in the opposite direction, and continues below.

1910–present

The rise and fall of Black land ownership.

Despite Reconstruction's reversal, Black land ownership grew in the decades that followed — through purchase, homesteading, and sheer persistence — reaching its peak around 1910, when Black farmers operated an estimated 16 to 19 million acres nationwide, close to 14 percent of all American farmland.

Over the following century, that acreage collapsed by roughly 90 percent. The causes are documented rather than mysterious: discriminatory denial or delay of USDA farm loans available to white farmers; tax and partition-sale foreclosures that disproportionately stripped land held without a clear will, known as "heirs' property"; and, in a documented number of cases, outright fraud, coercion, and violence.

1933–1968

Redlining and exclusion from homeownership.

The same pattern extended from farmland into the cities. Beginning in the 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods for mortgage risk on maps that marked Black and immigrant neighborhoods in red — the origin of "redlining" — steering federally backed lending away from them for decades. The Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manuals explicitly recommended racial covenants restricting who could buy a home.

The GI Bill's home-loan benefits, though written race-neutral, were administered locally in a way that left most Black veterans unable to access them. In the 1950s and '60s, urban renewal projects and interstate highway construction cleared Black neighborhoods in cities across the country, often citing the same maps drawn a generation earlier.

The present record

The record today.

Federal Reserve survey data continues to show a large gap between Black and white household wealth, and home or land equity — the asset this page traces from the start — remains one of the largest documented components of that gap. Heirs' property remains a live legal issue today; a 2018 Farm Bill provision was the first federal attempt to address it directly.

None of this is offered as a conclusion beyond what the record shows. It is offered as the record — the same standard applied to every exhibit in this archive.

Chronology

Timeline.

Sources

Where this comes from.

This page synthesizes established public-record history: federal statutes and executive orders, the USDA Census of Agriculture, Federal Reserve household wealth surveys, and Home Owners' Loan Corporation maps held by the National Archives. It is general context for the archive, not a Delaware exhibit — no specific person or entity named elsewhere on this site is discussed on this page.

Figures describing historical land acreage and ownership rates are widely cited estimates and are presented as such. Where sources vary, this page uses the range reported rather than a single precise figure.