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.

[3] 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).

By 1890, settlement in the American West had reached sufficient population density that the frontier line had disappeared.

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.

[12] Aggregate data for small areas, together with compatible cartographic boundary files, can be downloaded from the National Historical Geographic Information System.