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| Eugene E. Swanson was an African-American and a Spanish American war veteran. He homesteaded at the former Gold Rush town of Rampart, Alaska in 1928, using this house (shown). Samuel Heeter had previously built the house in 1903 when Rampart was a booming community. |
Between 1901 and 1988, fewer than 3,500 homestead patents were awarded to individuals in Alaska based on farming a portion of the land. Beginning in the 1930s, Alaska-only legislation prompted several thousands more patents for five-acre homesteads, also called “homesites” and “headquarter” sites, that didn’t require any cultivation. These 5-acre, non-agricultural “homesteads” required living on the land for most of three years. Claimants also paid $2.50 per acre. Technically these homesteaders “bought” the land instead of getting it for “free” by traditional homesteading. The last few of these unusual types of small-size “homestead” claims were still being patented near Slana and Lake Minchumina in the early twenty-first century, with some filed as recently as the 1980s.
Examples of homesteads in Central Alaska
William Egan Homestead/Homesite
William Allen Egan (1914-1984), Governor of Alaska during 1959-1966 and again 1970-1974, applied for a special type of Alaskan homestead (also called a homesite claim) on Aug. 22, 1950. It allowed for a claim of up to 5 acres. Subsequently, Egan built a cabin on the property locally called the "Egan Cabin" north of Valdez, Alaska along the Richardson Highway. However, he never received patent to the claim, with the case closed by BLM without action on July 8, 1959 (BLM casefile # AKA 016851). The cabin remained a trespass on public lands until 2009 when the current owners, the Powers family, quitclaimed deeded it to the State of AK. The AK State Dept. of Transportation subsequently removed the cabin for interpretive use to the Billy Mitchell Wayside along the Richardson Hwy. The land remains with BLM in 2011.
Slana Settlement Area abandoned Homestead/Homesite Claims
Similar to the Egan Cabin situation, BLM also manages perhaps hundreds of other abandoned small homestead/homesite claims (typically about 5 acres each) elsewhere in Alaska, especially in the two Slana Settlement areas which were among the final places where people could file for a special type of homestead in Alaska until the fall of 1986 when all forms of homesteading ended in Alaska (this was 10 years after FLPMA ended homesteading in the Lower 48, with AK granted a 10-year extension). These abandoned tracts are in an area of interior Alaska about 250 miles northeast of Anchorage and are mostly remote and not usually connected by roads.
Note: The type of claims allowed in this area until the fall of 1986 were “homesteads” under a special homestead act passed for Alaska in 1927 that allowed people “engaged in trade, manufacture, or other productive industry” to claim up to 5 acres for “a homestead or headquarters” for which they paid $2.50 per acre after meeting certain requirements. The claimed lands could not include “mineral, coal, oil or gas lands” and it had to be authorized for that type of homestead claim. For a 5-acre homestead (now generally termed a homesite), people had to establish a dwelling and live in it for a certain amount of time similar to a regular homestead claim. For a headquarters site, the person had to establish that up to 5 acres were necessary for a business of some sort that required that much land. People were also allowed to get one of each: a homestead/homesite and a headquarters site. For both, the 1927 law required doing no agriculture, making this type of Alaska-only homesteading perhaps the most unusual in the history of homesteading at any time and in any place in the USA.
Information supplied by John Jangala, BLM, Glennallen Field Office archaeologist, and Robert King, BLM, Alaska State Office.
Learn more about Alaskan homesteaders by visiting the Alaska's First and Last Homesteaders page.
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