Word: homesteads
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Under the Homestead Act of 1862, squatters took possession of millions of free acres of land in the West, but now there is not much worthwhile public land available. A few years ago, a Louisiana contractor named Louis Ray tried to establish himself as a homesteader on one of the last frontiers. Ray made a claim to several acres of coral reef that lay barely submerged five miles off the Florida coast...
Acting for a group of investors-and without Government permission-Ray started building a small island on the reefs off Elliot Key. He brought out equipment to dig fill out of the sea and, as a homestead, set up a prefabricated hut on his man-made island. When the U.S. contested his legal claim, Ray then argued that the island was outside Government jurisdiction. The reefs, he pointed out, were beyond the three-mile limit of U.S. territorial waters. Ray claimed that international law allows anyone who discovers an oceanic island and colonizes it to proclaim it a sovereign country...
...Homestead steel strike in 1892 (eight years after Allan's death) that finally turned the word Pinkerton into a hated synonym for union-breaking muscle; for during that strike, Winchester-toting agents were imported as "watchmen." As late as the 1930s, Pinkertons were finding congenial work playing labor spies on behalf of management. For today's Pinkerton heirs, however, the intoxicating old self-righteousness is gone. Robert II, the fourth generation of detective Pinkertons, who would have preferred to remain a Wall Street broker, is now chairman of the board. Seventy branch offices are tamely staffed with...
...seven quiet years, Ira Dennison, an upstate New York businessman, found the Adirondack Mountains over-looking Lake George a virtually soundproof haven from his workaday world. Then bulldozers rumbled onto his property, and the bosky dreamland in front of his colonial homestead became a concrete nightmare. Once remote and inaccessible, his hideaway was partly absorbed by a new exit for the six-lane Albany-to-Montreal Northway...
...came from Ulster. So did the ancestors of Sam Houston, Horace Greeley and ten U.S. Presidents.* Even so, last week was a special occasion. For a sentimental reunion on the ould sod, some 50 members of what is probably America's richest family gathered at the old family homestead -a clay-floored, thatch-roofed cottage near Omagh in County Tyrone...