1866 - The Florida land office of the Freedmen’s Bureau opened today.

The Freedmen’s Bureau in Florida sought, with a mixed degree of success, to secure land for African Americans. The Southern Homestead Act, approved by Congress on June 21, 1866, made available for public settlement 46 million acres of public lands in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Nineteen million acres of this Federal land was located in Florida. Because the Act specified that persons who applied could not be discriminated against because of race, it offered an opportunity for many Florida freedmen to become landowners. With the opening of the land office, the Freedmen’s Bureau, through “locating agents,” assisted interested freedmen in finding plots, and provided them with 1-month sustenance, free transportation to their prospective tracts of land, and seeds for the initial planting. By October 1866, in spite of the poor quality of much of the land, the absence of basic necessities, and white opposition, freedmen had made land entry transactions (“entered”) for 32,000 acres of public land. One year later, they had secured more than 2,000 homesteads, totaling 160,960 acres, and by 1868 freedmen entered over 3,000 homesteads, more than any other southern public land state.