Amache National Historic Site Granada War Relocation Center | |
Location | 23900 County Road FF, Granada, Colorado |
---|---|
Coordinates | 38°02′59″N102°19′43″W / 38.04962°N 102.3286°W |
Built | 1942 |
Architect | US Army Corps of Engineers; Lambie, Moss, Litle, and James |
Website | Amache National Historic Site |
NRHP reference No. | 94000425 [1] |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | May 18, 1994 [1] |
Designated NHL | February 10, 2006 [2] |
Designated NHS | March 18, 2022 |
Amache National Historic Site, formally the Granada War Relocation Center but known to the internees as Camp Amache (pronounced a-ma-chee), was a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in Prowers County, Colorado. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and sent to remote camps. Among the inmates, the notation "亜町 (Amachi)" was sometimes applied.[ citation needed ]
The camp, located 1.3 miles (2.1 km) southwest of the small farming community of Granada, south of U.S. Highway 50 , [3] was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 18, 1994, and designated a National Historic Landmark on February 10, 2006. [2] [4] On March 18, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Amache National Historic Site Act [5] authorizing the Granada War Relocation Center to become part of the National Park System. [6] It was formally established as part of the National Park Service on February 15, 2024, [7] the third National Historic Site in Colorado after Bent's Old Fort and the site of the Sand Creek Massacre.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the forced relocation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast with Executive Order 9066. Over the spring of 1942, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved into temporary assembly centers before being transferred to more permanent and isolated relocation centers like Granada. Run by the War Relocation Authority, the government body responsible for administration of the incarceration program, Granada was one of ten such camps, the only one to be built on private land. [8] The camp site covered 10,000 acres (40 km2), of which only 640 acres (2.6 km2) was used for residential, community and administrative buildings, while the rest was devoted to agricultural projects. The land was owned by several ranchers and farmers before the war, and only one of these property owners willingly sold his acreage to make way for the camp, creating tension between the WRA and the other landholders, whose parcels were taken via condemnation. This did not necessarily translate to overall resistance to Japanese Americans being housed in the area: Colorado Governor Ralph Lawrence Carr was one of the few to welcome the Japanese Americans and the only governor not to oppose the establishment of a WRA camp in his state, going against the anti-Japanese sentiment of the times. [9]
Granada opened August 27, 1942, and reached a peak population of 7,318 persons by February 1943, making it the smallest of the WRA camps (although the total number who passed through the camp during its three-year existence was over 10,000). Nearly all of the camp's original internees came from California: southwest Los Angeles, the Central Valley and the northern coast. [10] Many had been residents of the Yamato Colony, a farming settlement established by Issei businessman Kyutaro Abiko. [9]
The camp's unofficial name quickly became Camp Amache, named after a Cheyenne chief's daughter, Amache Prowers, the wife of John Wesley Prowers. (The county where Camp Amache is located is named after Prowers.) [11]
The Camp Amache residential area is spread atop a low hill, which prevented the flooding and mud problems which plagued other WRA camps, although the area was prone to high winds and severe dust storms. [9] It was surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, with eight machine-gun towers located all around the camp. However, all eight towers were rarely manned at one time, and the guns were never used. The Project Director, James G. Lindley, allowed internees to take day trips to the town of Granada, located within walking distance of the camp, and although some locals remained hostile to their "Jap" neighbors, most eventually warmed to the internees, with many business owners hiring Japanese Americans and stocking goods that catered to their Amache customers. [9]
Although relations with the residents of Granada and other nearby communities were largely positive, many Coloradans protested the construction of Amache High School in 1943. The region was still recovering from the Depression of the 1930s, and citizens argued their tax dollars should not go to support Japanese American students. Echoing widespread rumors that the WRA was "coddling" confined Japanese Americans while the rest of the country suffered from wartime shortages, U.S. Senator Edwin C. Johnson called it an example of "pampering" the enemy. The high school was completed in June 1943, but plans to construct two additional schools for elementary and junior high students were abandoned; middle schoolers shared the Amache High building with older students, while elementary school classes continued in a barracks in Block 8H. [9] [12] There were several clubs, extracurricular activities, and social events that were available to student of all grade levels in Amanche High School. [13]
Sources indicate that the high school football team lost one game in three years. One noteworthy event was when the Amache football team played the undefeated football team from Holly, Colorado, which is located just 11 miles (17.7 km) east of Amache on U.S. 50. This game was unique because Holly actually agreed to come up to the camp and play Amache on their home field. One of the Holly team players was Roy Romer, who went on to become Governor of Colorado. The Amache team won this game by a score of 7-0, the only touchdown coming from a trick play, thus the Amache team can claim to be undefeated on their own field.[ citation needed ] [14]
Adults in camp had various opportunities for employment. The camp had a police department which was worked by sixty Japanese American internees, although it was headed by a white security officer. Similarly, the Amache Fire Department consisted of three crews of Japanese American firefighters and one internee fire chief working under white supervisors. [15] Some (though not many) who had earned teaching credentials prior to their confinement were employed in the camp schools. [12] A silkscreen shop was established in 1943, and its forty-five staff members created training materials and over 250,000 color posters for the U.S. Navy, in addition to calendars, program events and other personal-use items for camp residents. [9] As in all the WRA camps, doctors, nurses, dentists, and other healthcare workers found work at the camp hospital, although they were paid significantly less than their white coworkers — and fellow internees often pooled money to subsidize their low wages. [15]
Most of the work in Granada was directed at agricultural production. Like most of the other WRA camps, the land surrounding the residential areas were devoted to farming and raising livestock. The WRA budget restricted the per-inmate food allotment to 45 cents a day, partly to avoid the complaints of coddling and partly because the camp was intended to be mostly self-sufficient in its food production. These efforts proved especially successful at Granada, where internee laborers produced enough to feed the entire camp population and send the surplus to the U.S. Army and other camps. (In 1943, for example, Granada farmers grew 4 million pounds of vegetables.) [9] [16]
Internee leaders set up a separate Amache District for Boy Scouts at the camp. These Scouts still flew the American flag as seen in the photograph at right of a Boy Scout Memorial Day parade at the camp.[ citation needed ]
In June 1942, the War Department authorized the formation of the 100th Infantry Battalion consisting of 1,432 men of Japanese descent in the Hawaii National Guard and sent them to Camps McCoy and Shelby for advanced training. [17] Because of its superior training record, the Army's previous restrictions against Nisei (listed as enemy aliens ineligible for active service after Pearl Harbor) were lifted in order to create the 442nd RCT in January 1943 when 10,000 men from Hawaii signed up with eventually 2,686 being chosen along with 1,500 from the mainland. [18] The 100th Infantry Battalion entered combat in September 1943 and it became known as the Purple Heart Battalion because of their heroism and horrific casualties. It was joined by the 442nd RCT in June 1944 and together it lived up to the motto "Go For Broke" because of the degree to which its soldiers risked their lives in battle and became the most highly decorated unit in the war and to this day, for its size and length of service. Eventually, 441 Nisei joined the U.S. Army from this camp, either volunteering or accepting their conscription into the famed 100th/442nd and MIS. In the southwest corner of the camp is a small cemetery and memorial dedicated to the Japanese Americans from there who volunteered to fight in Europe in World War II. A large stone memorial with 31 men's names engraved in it sits in the cemetery in memory of those soldiers from Amache who died defending the U.S. [3]
Since 1990, the Amache Preservation Society, a Granada high school group, has worked on preservation of the site and its documents. [4] [19] As a school project, Granada Undivided High School students have set up a museum for the Granada War Relocation Center.[ citation needed ]
On December 21, 2006, President George W. Bush signed H.R. 1492 into law guaranteeing $38,000,000 in federal money to restore the Granada relocation center and nine other former Japanese American internment camps. [20] Granada Relocation Center National Historic Site Acts were introduced in 2006 [21] and 2007 [22] by Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard but got no traction.
In April 2021, Colorado U.S. Representatives Ken Buck and Joe Neguse introduced the Amache National Historic Site Act (HR 2497). [23] [24] [25] President Joe Biden signed the act into law on March 18, 2022, authorizing the site to become part of the National Park Service pending acquisition of property. [26] The NPS completed a Special Resource Study on the site in October 2022. [27]
Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945. Although it had over 10,000 inmates at its peak, it was one of the smaller internment camps. It is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California's Owens Valley, between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar means "apple orchard" in Spanish. The Manzanar National Historic Site, which preserves and interprets the legacy of Japanese American incarceration in the United States, was identified by the United States National Park Service as the best-preserved of the ten former camp sites.
During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the detainees were United States citizens. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Island in December 1941. Before the war, about 127,000 Japanese Americans lived in the continental United States, of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei and Sansei. The rest were Issei immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship. In Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were incarcerated.
Granada is a Statutory Town in Prowers County, Colorado, United States. The town population was 445 at the 2020 United States Census.
The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was a United States government agency established to handle the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also operated the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York, which was the only refugee camp set up in the United States for refugees from Europe. The agency was created by Executive Order 9102 on March 18, 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was terminated June 26, 1946, by order of President Harry S. Truman.
The Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, named after nearby Heart Mountain and located midway between the northwest Wyoming towns of Cody and Powell, was one of ten concentration camps used for the internment of Japanese Americans evicted during World War II from their local communities in the West Coast Exclusion Zone by the executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The Gila River War Relocation Center was an American concentration camp in Arizona, one of several built by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) during the Second World War for the incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. It was located within the Gila River Indian Reservation near the town of Sacaton, about 30 mi (48.3 km) southeast of Phoenix. With a peak population of 13,348, it became the fourth-largest city in the state, operating from May 1942 to November 16, 1945.
The Tule Lake National Monument in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California, consists primarily of the site of the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, one of ten concentration camps constructed in 1942 by the United States government to incarcerate Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast. They totaled nearly 120,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens. Among the inmates, the notation "鶴嶺湖" was sometimes applied.
Minidoka National Historic Site is a National Historic Site in the western United States. It commemorates the more than 13,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the Second World War. Among the inmates, the notation 峰土香 or 峯土香 was sometimes applied.
The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp in which Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come to the United States from Japan, called Nikkei were incarcerated. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, ordering people of Japanese ancestry to be incarcerated in what were euphemistically called "relocation centers" like Topaz during World War II. Most of the people incarcerated at Topaz came from the Tanforan Assembly Center and previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The camp was opened in September 1942 and closed in October 1945.
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The Jerome War Relocation Center was a Japanese American internment camp located in southeastern Arkansas, near the town of Jerome in the Arkansas Delta. Open from October 6, 1942, until June 30, 1944, it was the last American concentration camp to open and the first to close. At one point it held as many as 8,497 detainees. After closing, it was converted into a holding camp for German prisoners of war. Today, few remains of the camp are visible, as the wooden buildings were taken down. The smokestack from the hospital incinerator still stands.
The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese American concentration camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. It was in operation from September 18, 1942, until November 30, 1945, and held as many as 8,475 Japanese Americans forcibly evacuated from California. Among the inmates, the notation "朗和" was sometimes applied. The Rohwer War Relocation Center Cemetery is located here, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
Granada School is a public school serving Granada, Colorado, United States. It is the only school in Granada School District RE-1.
Crystal City Internment Camp, located near Crystal City, Texas, was a place of confinement for people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent during World War II, and has been variously described as a detention facility or a concentration camp. The camp, which was originally designed to hold 3,500 people, opened in December 1943 and was officially closed on February 11, 1948.
Camp Tulelake was a federal work facility and War Relocation Authority isolation center located in Siskiyou County, five miles west of Tulelake, California. It was established by the United States government in 1935 during the Great Depression for vocational training and work relief for young men, in a program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps. The camp was established initially for CCC enrollees to work on the Klamath Reclamation Project.
The Day of Remembrance is a day of commemoration for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. It is a day for people of Japanese descent in the U.S. to reflect upon the consequences of Executive Order 9066. The Day of Remembrance also creates a space for the facilitation of dialogue and informing the public about the repercussions of such government action. Events in numerous U.S. states, especially in the West Coast, are held on or near February 19, the day in 1942 that Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, requiring internment of all Americans of Japanese ancestry. Areas where people of Japanese descent in the U.S. were forced to relocate included Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, and Idaho. There are events held in each of these states as well. Events are not only relegated to the West Coast and it is widely observed in areas such as New England, Chicago, Alaska, Philadelphia, and New York.
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Esther Takei Nishio was an American woman from California, incarcerated at the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado during World War II. She was the first Japanese-American student to enroll in a California university after returning from camp, in 1944, when she was chosen as a test case for resettlement.
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