The Granada War Relocation Center, better known as Camp Amache, was just one of several Japanese-American internment camps that operated in the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But a new law signed by President Joe Biden on March 18 will turn the historic site into the nation's newest national park.
Just a mile outside Granada, Colorado, Camp Amache held thousands of Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants from August 1942 until the camp closed in October 1945. At its height, more than 7,300 people were housed in a one-mile-square space of rudimentary barracks.
The Amache Preservation Society, formed by a high school social studies teacher, has maintained the site with volunteers, established a museum and research center, and restored landmarks such as the reconstructed water tower – the tallest structure for miles on the flat landscape – and the guard tower from which internees were surveilled. A barrack has been built on the site with funding from the National Park Service and others and a recreation building was moved from nearby Granada back to the site in 2018. The Society has also restored the cemetery for the interned residents who never saw home again.
The group’s website refers to the site as a concentration camp with 29 blocks of 12 barracks. Each barrack was 120’ x 20’ with a tar paper roof, in turn divided into six ‘apartments’ heated by a coal-burning stove. Each barrack was lit by a single 60 watt light bulb hung from the ceiling, and the bedding was Army cots. Internees made their own furnishings from scrap lumber around the premises.
Today, only the cement barrack foundations remain, along with cement slab from laundry rooms and showers, and base anchors for the guard towers. Most buildings were sold by the War Assets Administration in 1947, but the Friends of Amache want to rebuild parts of the complex to better illustrate what it was like for those forced to live there. Donations are welcomed.
You can visit the site now before its official designation as our 424th National Park. The area is open during daylight and not gated. If you want to track down which barrack a family member was interned in, you can look at the registry site created by the University of Denver.