Tampa FLA
March 31st 1868
Sr Allen H. Jackson
A.A.A.G & D.O.B.R.F & A.L
Jacksonville FLA
Sir:
I have the honor to report that during the last nineteen days of February, I made four locations_
On the 24th of July I went to Brooksville, and returned on the 18th of the present Month. While there I made forty five (45) locations, four of them State Land by purchase_
I found the Freedmen in the vicinity of Brooksville very anxious to settle on homesteads, and thus commend the proceeds of their labor. Some of those whom I located had already settled and built homes but had never entered their land. The Brooksville people had it arranged so that it cost a freedmen, to enter a homestead, without having it surveyed, twelve dollars or more. Five dollars for the numbers of land of the land, two dollars for the Land Office, seventy-five cents for the oath, and, five dollars to the Clerk for corresponding with the Land Office. The surveying would cost them five or ten dollars or more. I shall have to return them in June after the corn crop is laid by, and locate probably as many more.
Since returning from Brooksville I have made five (5) locations.
I am very respectfully
Your obs Servt
Wm. Lee Arthorp
P.S. Please send me a few sets of vouchers, 22s and a set of vouchers for travelling expenses.
** This report was sent to the Freedmen’s Bureau District Office in Jacksonville from Locating Agent Arthorp. Since the Bureau was in charge of abandoned and confiscated land, they issued these lands through the locating agents whose job was to locate and collect homestead applications and issue those homesteads to the freedmen they met with. In this report Agent Arthorp had spent nearly a month in Brooksville collecting and issue homesteads. Agent Arthorp is reporting in this letter that he had issued 45 homesteads to the freedmen in the vicinity of Brooksville and that the freedmen were very anxious to settle on homesteads. Agent Arthorp also makes another interesting observation in this report and this is the fact that many freedmen in the Brooksville area had settled on land that they did not own nor apply for through homesteads. The agent reports that the people of Brooksville had made arrangements for the freedmen to do this. These arrangements made the jobs of the Freedmen’s Bureau agents quite easy in Florida as many times arrangements were made without the assistance of the Bureau and in such case then the Freedmen’s Bureau would monitor the progress of such arrangements as Agent Arthorp states he will be doing in June.
