Public lands include all the territory owned by a national government. The United States government owns about 762 million acres (305 million hectares) of land, or about a third of the land area of the country. Most of the public lands are in the western part of the nation, with the largest amount in Alaska. Congress may use or dispose of it in whatever way it feels will best serve the public interest.
Public lands may be divided into (1) public-domain lands and (2) acquired lands. Public-domain lands have never been privately owned. They are what remains of the land acquired by the U.S. government from the 13 original states and from other nations. Acquired lands are lands the federal government has acquired from private owners and from state and local governments. Much of the land was purchased for such purposes as government buildings and defense installations. About 703 million acres (281 million hectares) of U.S. public lands are lands in the public domain, and about 59 million acres (24 million hectares) have been acquired. Sometimes, the term public-domain lands is used to refer to all government-owned lands.
The government reserves some of the public lands for military and naval installations, reclamation projects, wildlife refuges, federal buildings, and national cemeteries, forests, monuments, and parks. The term public lands, however, commonly applies to land that the government will lease or sell to private individuals. It does not include land that has been set aside for national parks and other uses. Since the United States became a nation, more than 1 billion acres (400 million hectares) of public land have been sold, granted to homesteaders, or otherwise turned over to private owners.
Management of public lands
Most of the public lands in the United States are administered by the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior. But many other federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense, have jurisdiction over some public land. The Bureau of Land Management occasionally sells some of its land at public auction or trades it for land that connects other public lands.
In surveying public lands, the government divides an area into units of 36 square miles (93 square kilometers), called townships. Each township is further divided in a checkerboard fashion into 36 sections of 1 square mile (2.6 square kilometers). Each section, containing 640 acres (259 hectares), is divided into quarter sections of 160 acres (65 hectares). To help locate and describe any particular piece of land, surveyors use certain meridians of longitude (north-south lines), called principal meridians, and certain parallels of latitude (east-west lines), called base lines. All townships lying in a line from north to south are described as a range. See Westward movement in America (The Ordinance of 1785) .
History
Acquisition of public lands.
Between 1781 and 1786, the federal government gained control over a large area west of the Allegheny Mountains and north of the Ohio River. Four eastern states had claimed all or part of this region during the colonial period. By 1802, other seaboard states ceded what is now the states of Alabama and Mississippi.
The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 almost doubled the size of the United States. Other important additions of territory include the acquisition of Florida in 1819, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the acquisition of Oregon in 1846, the cession by Mexico of a vast territory between Texas and the Pacific Ocean in 1848, the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the purchase of Alaska in 1867, and the annexation of Hawaii in 1898. Almost all this land became part of the United States public lands. Texas and Hawaii retained control of the public lands within their borders, because they had been independent nations.
Disposal of public lands.
As early as 1783, land companies tried to purchase public lands for the purpose of establishing settlements in the area north of the Ohio River. Their actions forced Congress to formulate a policy for the disposition of public lands. In the Ordinance of 1785, Congress adopted policies intended to produce revenue and encourage compact settlement. The ordinance also established a permanent method for surveying. The land policies expressed in this law represented the views of Easterners, and soon proved unpopular in the West. Under pressure from Western members of Congress, later land laws permitted purchasers to buy a specified minimum amount of land at a low price. The laws encouraged pioneers to buy and settle on any public lands that had been surveyed.
An important development in land policy came in 1862, with the passage of the Homestead Act. It provided that people who lived on public lands for five years and made certain improvements might acquire title to 160 acres (65 hectares) through the payment of very small fees. This law made it possible for workers in Eastern cities to move west and own farms of their own.
Individual settlers were not the only people interested in obtaining grants of public land. Land companies and speculators bought large tracts of land to sell to people who wanted new homes in the West. After 1850, corporations and individual promoters tried to gain control of large acreages for grazing, mining, logging, or control of other natural resources. Such groups acquired much of the public land in the Far West.
The government also used the public lands to promote certain of its own objectives. It offered free land to veterans of every war from the American Revolutionary War through the Mexican War. It granted land to the states for the support of public education. The Morrill Act of 1862 gave to each state an amount of land in proportion to its population for the establishment of agricultural colleges (see Land-grant university ). The government also gave generous grants of land to railroads along proposed rights of way to encourage railroad building west of the Mississippi River.
By 1890, nearly all the good farmland had passed into private ownership. But private owners acquired large amounts of other land under the Homestead Act until the mid-1930’s. In 1976, the U.S. government ended the homesteading program in all states except Alaska. It expired there in 1986.
