This is an easy one: the Homestead Act of 1862 giveth and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 taketh away.

With this act, the Lower 48 states, after sixty-four years of homesteading and the closing of the frontier, finally ended homesteading. Alaska, having only gained statehood in 1959, was granted an extra decade of homesteading. (This turned out well for Ken Deardorff, the last official homesteader.)

Admittedly, the land for homesteading had shrunk, especially after FDR took back a bunch of it for National Parks. Otherwise, 27 million acres of land had been distributed for homesteads from 1863 to 1986. Pretty much all the good land was taken…and we saw what happened in the 1930s when the not-so-good land was tried (cough* Dust Bowl cough*).

It was time to end the program.