1890 United States Census

The Eleventh United States Census was taken,. Unfortunately, most of the 1890 census was destroyed in during a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C. The 1890 census announced that the   of the  no longer existed and therefore the tracking of westward migration would no longer be tabulated in the census. This trend prompted to develop his milestone.

The 1890 census was the first to be compiled on a, developed by. This introduction of reduced the time taken to tabulate the census from eight years for the  to one year for the 1890 census. The total population of 62,622,250 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 al difficulties in compiling the census drove for the next fifty years until computers became widespread in industry. 's first was created primarily to deal with the needs of the census in addition to  and  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 and later destroyed by bureaucratic error. The other censuses that have lost almost all information were the and  enumerations.