The Nation: New Homestead

It was homesteading that first opened the American West, but for decades the nation's small farmers have been slowly abandoning the land for the cities. Now, in an experiment, the Office of Economic Opportunity in Oklahoma has begun a homesteading program that will initially settle 300 families, many of them urban welfare clients, on wooded ten-acre farms near Stringtown. This month the first families will begin moving in. Each will receive a chain saw with which to clear the land, then will sell the timber in order to begin paying for the land at $80 an acre. Within three or four years, the homesteaders should be harvesting regular fruit crops and earning some $7,000 a year per family.

The OEO has received thousands of applications, many from out of state, including a number from Oklahomans who fled to California during the Dust Bowl days of the '30s. Many Viet Nam veterans applied, along with at least one out-of-work aerospace engineer. Despite the trend toward agribusiness, there is a widespread nostalgia for the land. Another applicant is a $190-a-week television film editor who lives in a suburb of Boston. "It's a chance for me to work at something that would be my very own," he wrote. "I'm sick of pollution, demonstrations and riots. I want to get away."