Thirty states, thirty land rushes
Every public-land state was patented on its own clock. Ohio and Indiana were largely in private hands before the Civil War; the Dakotas, Montana and Washington boomed after 1900; Alaska's conveyances run to the present. Select a state to see it on the map.
| State | Patents | Acres patented | Peak year | Main era | Patent type mix | Patents per year, 1785–2026 | Most common authority |
|---|
Patents are distinct GLO patent documents with a usable date, counting every patent in the state's GeoPackage, including ones whose location could not be mapped. Main era is the span in which the middle 80% of a state's patents were signed. Acres are the sum of recorded patent acreage and are missing for some older documents. Counts cover 99.5% or more of each state's GLO patents, except Alaska (86%) and Ohio (96%), where some patents have no township or fall in special surveys the PLSS grid can't place.
How the land was given out
Annual patents, stacked by the kind of entry. Each surge follows a law from Congress that opened a new way to claim public land.
The laws behind the curve
About this map
Between 1785 and the late twentieth century the federal government transferred more than a billion acres of public domain to private owners, one land patent at a time. The Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office records hold the surviving patents. This site maps them.
Each patent describes its land by the Public Land Survey System: meridian, township, range and section. Placing those descriptions on the PLSS grid turns a records archive into a map of when each part of the country passed into private hands.
How it was built
Patent records for each state were downloaded from BLM's GLO Records search as paged JSON responses. The search returns at most about 100,000 records per query, so
glo_backfill.pysplit every larger state into date ranges (and, for undated New Mexico patents, counties) below that limit.build_glo_patents_gis.pyparsed every legal description, resolved each meridian code against BLM's LR2000 meridian table, and placed each location at its PLSS section centroid, falling back to the township centroid where no section was given. The output is one GeoPackage per state: apatent_locationspoint layer joined one-to-many to apatent_attributestable.apply_glo_location_fix.pycorrected those positions, because an idealized 6-mile grid drifts away from the real survey: up to 60 km by western Wyoming and about 35 km across North Dakota. In 17 western states each section is now placed inside its actual township polygon from the BLM survey (via the Late Homesteading replication data). Elsewhere a smooth correction per meridian moves points so they fall inside the county each patent names; tested against the western townships, it cut North Dakota's median error from 35 km to 8 km. About 5,800 locations (0.24%) that still landed more than 20 km outside their state, usually from a mis-coded meridian, are left off the map. Alaska keeps the grid positions.aggregate_glo_timeslider.pybinned every located patent into a 0.1° grid (about 11 km north–south) by year and entry type. A patent is counted once per cell, so one that spans two cells appears in both.aggregate_glo_states.pycounted distinct patents per state by year and type for the States and Timeline pages.
Reading it carefully
Year is the patent's signature date, or its search date where no signature date was recorded. That date marks when title passed, which can lag settlement by five years or more under the Homestead Act.
Entry types are grouped from the GLO "authority" field. Homestead covers original, enlarged and stock-raising entries; cash sale includes credit sales; warrant and scrip covers military bounty warrants and scrip; grants and claims covers state grants, railroad and Indian patents, and private land claims. Non-patent records are BLM land-status entries (CDI, survey plats and LSR serial records) that sit alongside patents in the GLO database.
Completeness: the site holds 5.9 million dated patents, 99.5% or more of what the GLO search reports for each state except Alaska (86%) and Ohio (96%). An earlier download had stopped at the search's 100,000-record limit in 25 states; those gaps were filled in November 2026, along with the land-status (CDI) and survey records, which are now 99.8% complete or better.
What's missing: records without any usable date (about 190,000 location rows, concentrated in Alaska and New Mexico), locations under unspecified meridians, and some special surveys that do not fit the rectangular grid. Texas and the original thirteen states were never federal public domain and have no GLO patents.
Sources
- Patent records
- U.S. Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records.
- Survey grid
- BLM Cadastral National Spatial Data Infrastructure (CadNSDI) PLSS first-division table, used to match section identifiers.
- Meridian codes
- BLM LR2000 meridian code table.
- State boundaries
- U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundaries via us-atlas.