John A Johnston

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John A Johnston is one of 92,125 beneficiaries of a 132-year-old federal mining law that gives away precious metals, minerals, and even the title to the land itself for less than $10 an acre. John A Johnston gained title to an estimated 1 acres of lands previously owned by the public giving John A Johnston more total land holdings (claims and patents) than 3.8% of all other mining interests.

Information on subsidiaries and parent companies shown here represents our best estimate of corporate structure at the time of this website release, and are drawn from various publicly available sources. Please report any noted omissions and errors to EWG with a credible source or citation. Thank you.

Overview of Ownership

	Claims	Patents	Mining Plans & Notices
Number	0	1	0
Estimated Acreage	0	1	0
States

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Source: EWG analysis of US BLM data.

Patents

John A Johnston is one of 63,768 beneficiaries of a long-standing federal subsidy called "patenting" that allows mining interests to purchase public land for no more than $5 an acre. Since acquiring title to the land, John A Johnston may have mined it, sold it, leased it, or passed it on to heirs or other corporate interests. Regardless of who owns the property now, the U.S. public has lost all rights- metals, minerals, and title - on land that was once public park or forest.

For John A Johnston:

• Ranking among U.S. patent grantees for total land won: number 60,386 (along with 4 others) of 63,768 total patent winners.
• Land gained exceeds total patented acreage for: 5.3% of all other patent winners
• Earliest patent: 1891
• Latest patent: 1891

Patents by State.

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Source: EWG analysis of US BLM data.

Source: EWG analysis of Bureau of Land Management's Land and Mineral Records 2000 (LR2000) data system. For claims, acreages are estimated based on maximum allowable size of claims. For patents, acreages are taken directly from the LR2000 database where available, and are estimated based on maximum allowable size of claim that preceded the patent where acreages are not noted in LR2000. All notices are assumed to be five acres in size, and the size of plans are calculated directly as the size of the land represented by the legal land description in the LR2000 database. The acreages we estimate through these methods would tend to overestimate the actual amount. We welcome corrections here, and would welcome a federal data management system that included the acreages involved in these important federal land transactions.