BLM Eastern States History

In 1954, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was only eight years old when it changed how it was organized, moving from regional offices to state offices. The Eastern States office was created to handle the BLM’s duties for public lands in the 31 states east of and next to the Mississippi River. It also took care of the Eastern States Land Office, which includes land records from previous offices of the General Land Office (GLO) in the Midwest and southern states.

In the past, the GLO had over 400 offices to help transfer public lands to private owners. Today, the Eastern States office continues this work and has the largest collection of land title records in the world. This collection includes more than 9 million historic land records that go all the way back to 1787.

The Eastern States headquarters was originally located in Washington, D.C., but in 1963, it moved to Silver Springs, Maryland. Then, in 1973, the office crossed the Potomac River and moved to Alexandria, Virginia. Finally, in 1992, it settled in Springfield, Virginia. In 2015, the Eastern States Office moved back to Washington, D.C., when it started sharing space with the Washington Office.

As the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) took on more responsibilities for minerals on federal lands in the eastern states, activity there increased, and new natural resource challenges appeared. The focus of the Eastern States office shifted from mainly handling land titles to dealing with many of the same issues as the BLM in the western United States. When the BLM merged with the Minerals Management Service, the Eastern States Office gained important new responsibilities for managing minerals. To support this, District Offices were created in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Mississippi, in 1983.

In 1993, the Milwaukee District Office was changed to the Milwaukee Field Office, and the Jackson District Office became the Jackson Field Office. Then, in 2010, these two offices were renamed the Northeastern States Field Office and the Southeastern States Field Office. In 2015, both offices went back to their original names and are now called the Northeastern and Southeastern States Districts.

In 2001, the Lower Potomac Field Station Office was opened in Lorton, Virginia. It manages the Meadowood Special Recreation Area in Fairfax County, Virginia, and the Douglas Point Recreation Area in Charles County, Maryland.

Eastern States manages public lands and resources for present and future generations. This includes the development of solid and fluid minerals on public domain and acquired lands on approximately 40 million acres of federal mineral estate, and scattered surface tracts in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The BLM Eastern States functions in the same manner as those throughout the West, focusing on widely based multiple-use resource management under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976.