the.com/homestead
a self-built world where you trade rent for sweat and groceries for chores.
means A house and the land around it occupied as a family home, especially one a settler claimed and worked to make self-sufficient.
from A plain Old English compound of 'ham' (home) and 'stede' (place, stead) — literally a 'home-place' — kin to words like 'instead' and 'bedstead,' all from that old Germanic 'stede' meaning a standing-spot or position. It rode along quietly for centuries until America gave it a new charge: the Homestead Act, which handed out frontier land to anyone who'd settle and farm it, cementing the word's flavor of land claimed and earned by labor.
- law origin
- 1862 act gave 160 free acres to settlers
- acreage claimed
- 270 million acres handed out, 10% of America
- last claim
- Alaska homestead granted in 1988
- the catch
- settlers had to survive five years to keep it
- modern revival
- now means goats, solar panels, and Instagram
lincoln homestead state park — abraham lincoln's family homestead in kentucky where he was born in 1809
homestead strike — 1892 labor conflict at carnegie steel works in homestead, pennsylvania
homestead act — 1862 u.s. law that gave 160 acres to settlers who farmed for 5 years