1890 United States Census 3606825 224344867 2008-07-08T13:06:52Z 38.100.43.50 [[Image:1890B.jpg|thumb|200px|right|1890 Census form]] The '''Eleventh United States Census''' was taken [[June 2]], [[1890]]. Unfortunately, most of the 1890 census was destroyed in [[1921]] during a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C. The 1890 census announced that the [[frontier]] [[region]] of the [[United States]] no longer existed and therefore the tracking of westward migration would no longer be tabulated in the census. This trend prompted [[Frederick Jackson Turner]] to develop his milestone [[Frontier Thesis]]. The 1890 census was the first to be compiled on a [[tabulating machine]], developed by [[Herman Hollerith]].<ref name="loc">[http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mcc:@field(DOCID+@lit(mcc/023)) Hollerith's Electric Sorting and Tabulating Machine, ca. 1895] from the [[American Memory]] archives of the [[Library of Congress]]</ref> This introduction of [[technology]] reduced the time taken to tabulate the census from eight years for the [[U.S. Census, 1880|1880 census]] to one year for the 1890 census.<ref name="loc"/> The total population of 62,947,714<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1991-02.pdf |title=Population and Area (Historical Censuses) |publisher=United States Census Bureau}}</ref> was announced after only six weeks of processing. The public reaction to this tabulation was disbelief, as it was widely believed that the "right answer" was at least 75,000,000. The [[logistic]]al difficulties in compiling the census drove [[computing technology]] for the next fifty years until computers became widespread in industry. [[IBM]]'s first [[electronic computer]] was created primarily to deal with the needs of the census in addition to [[military]] and [[academic]] uses. This census is one of the three for which the original data is no longer available. Almost all the population schedules were damaged in a fire in [[1921]] and later destroyed by bureaucratic error. The other censuses that have lost almost all information were the [[United States Census, 1800|1800]] and [[United States Census, 1810|1810]] enumerations.{{Fact|date=November 2007}} ==References== {{reflist}} ==External links== *[http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/hiscendata.html Historic US Census data] from the U.S. Census Bureau website {{USCensus}} [[Category:1890 in the United States]] {{US-gov-stub}} {{US-hist-stub}} [[ro:Recensământul Statelor Unite ale Americii din 1890]]