Arkansas’s Keeping it in the Family Project i In 1894, Ann Boles was granted more than 500 acres of land in Howard County by President Grover Cleveland. Today, only half the land remains in the family due to the lack of estate planning. Unfortunately, this is a common problem for many minority land owners. Ann’s estate is now split among 27 family members, and great grandson Jerry is working with other family members to ensure the remaining land stays in the family by participating in Arkansas’s Keeping it in the Family (KIITF) project, funded by a national grant. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, land owned by minorities was often passed down informally to family members without legal documentation after the original owner died. This is referred to as heirs property, which is extremely vulnerable to being lost through partition sales, misuse by some heirs, voluntary sales and tax sales, the main cause for the Boles’ land loss. This vulnerability, coupled with discrimination in lending and government agencies, has had a devastating effect on African-American land owners, according to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, one of the partner agencies in KIITF. To combat this problem, Arkansas became the fifth state in the country 82 ARKANSAS GROWN to enact the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which helps to protect the interests and needs of vulnerable landowners. Boles and his family are currently working with the Bowen School, which provides heirs property resolution assistance, application guidance to USDA technical and financial assistance programs and legal education and outreach to rural communities. Clearing the problems with heirs property opens up opportunities for the land to become profitable for the owners and for the community, according to Professor Amy Ann Boles Pritchard from the Bowen School. “This project helps provide rural land owners with economic opportunities that they would otherwise not have,” said Pritchard. “Those economic benefits are also returned into the community exponentially by allowing the land owner to start forestry activity on the property and in-turn providing individuals there to benefit from that activity.” The Boles family began working with the KIITF project in spring of 2017, when Jerry learned about it from social media, and is thankful for the information and assistance that they have been provided from Bowen School of Law and the Arkansas Agriculture Department’s
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