The 1890 United States census was taken beginning June 2, 1890. The census determined the resident population of the United States to be 62,979,766, an increase of 25.5 percent over the 50,189,209 persons enumerated during the 1880 census. The data reported that the distribution of the population had resulted in the disappearance of the American frontier.
This was the first census in which a majority of states recorded populations of over one million and the first in which three cities, New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, recorded populations of over one million. The census also saw Chicago rise in rank to the nation's second-most populous city, a position it would hold until Los Angeles, the 57th-most populous city as of 1890, supplanted it in 1990. This was the first U.S. census to use machines to tabulate the collected data.
Most of the 1890 census materials were destroyed on January 10, 1921, when the Commerce Department building caught fire, and in the subsequent disposal of the remaining damaged records.
Census questions
The 1890 census collected the following information:
- address
- number of families in house
- number of persons in house
- names
- whether a soldier, sailor or Marine (Union or Confederate) during the American Civil War, or a widow of such person
- relationship to head of family
- race, described as white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian
- sex
- age
- marital status
- married within the year
- mother of how many children, and number now living
- place of birth of person, and their father and mother
- if foreign-born, number of years in U.S.
- whether naturalized
- whether naturalization papers have been taken out
- profession, trade or occupation
- months unemployed during census year
- ability to read and write
- ability to speak English, and, if unable, language or dialect spoken
- whether suffering from acute or chronic disease, with name of disease and length of time afflicted
- whether defective in mind, sight, hearing or speech, or whether crippled, maimed or deformed, with name of defect
- whether a prisoner, convict, homeless child, or pauper
- home rented, or owned by head or member of family, and, if owned, whether free from mortgage
- if farmer, whether farm is rented, or owned by head or member of family; if owned, whether free from mortgage; if rented, post office box of owner
Methodology
The 1890 census was the first to be compiled using methods invented by Herman Hollerith and was overseen by Superintendents Robert P. Porter (1889–1893) and Carroll D. Wright (1893–1897). Data was entered on a machine readable medium (punched cards) and tabulated by machine. Changes from the 1880 census included the larger population, the number of data items to be collected from individuals, the Census Bureau headcount, the volume of scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators. The net effect of these changes was to reduce the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census. The total population of 62,947,714, the family, or rough, count, was announced after only six weeks of processing (punched cards were not used for this tabulation). The public reaction to this tabulation was disbelief, as it was widely believed that the "right answer" was at least 75,000,000.
Significant findings
The United States census of 1890 showed a total of 248,253 Native Americans living in the United States, down from 400,764 Native Americans identified in the census of 1850.
The 1890 census announced that the frontier region of the United States no longer existed, and that the Census Bureau would no longer track the westward migration of the U.S. population. In practice, however, said migration can still be tracked by plotting each succeeding census' mean center of United States population.
By 1890, settlement in the American West had reached sufficient population density that the frontier line had disappeared. For the 1890 census, the Census Bureau released a bulletin declaring the closing of the frontier, stating: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports."
Statisticians at the time argued that the results of the 1890 census was most likely an undercount of the total population in the United States from anywhere between one million to several millions, and that African Americans, working-class people, and young children were most likely to be undercounted.
Data availability
The original data for the 1890 census is mostly unavailable. The population schedules were damaged in a fire in the basement of the U.S. Department of Commerce building in Washington, D.C. in 1921. Some 25% of the materials were presumed destroyed and another 50% damaged by smoke and water, although the actual damage may have been closer to 15–25%. The damage to the records led to an outcry for a permanent National Archives. In December 1932, following standard federal record-keeping procedures, the Chief Clerk of the Bureau of the Census sent the Librarian of Congress a list of papers to be destroyed, including the original 1890 census schedules. The Librarian was asked by the Bureau to identify any records which should be retained for historical purposes, but the Librarian did not accept the census records. Congress authorized destruction of that list of records on February 21, 1933, and the surviving original 1890 census records were destroyed by government order by 1934 or 1935. Few sets of microdata from the 1890 census survive. Aggregate data for small areas, together with compatible cartographic boundary files, can be downloaded from the National Historical Geographic Information System.
A directory of the 1890 US Census results for Northampton County, Pennsylvania (explicitly listing all of its 1890 inhabitants along with their names, professions, and ages) published by Joseph H. Werner in 1891 has survived up to the present day. This directory's existence has further solidified the evidence in favor of all-time validated American longevity recordholder Sarah Knauss's (1880-1999) age of 119 years, 97 days at the time of her death, for she is listed as a 10-year-old child (her 10th birthday wasn't until September 1890, several months after the official date of the 1890 US Census, but the 1890 census enumerator instructions explicitly said to round people's ages upwards) together with her family in this directory (they all lived in Northampton County, Pennsylvania back in 1890, specifically in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania).