CAMP AMACHE
Prowers County, Colorado
State Historical Fund Project # - 2003-02-035
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive
Order 9066, authorizing the creation of the War Relocation Authority.
Camp Amache was on of ten relocation camps built to house Japanese
American evacuees. Construction began in July/August and evacuees
began to arrive right away, and by October of 1942 there were a
total of 6785 evacuees at the camp. The peak population was 7318
in February of 1943 making it the 10th largest city in Colorado at that
time.
In 2003 a State Historical Fund grant was awarded to the Town of
Granada to survey the site and create a historical site management
plan. The survey revealed many left-behind details that tell us
about life at Amache. As a way of bringing aspects of Japanese American
culture to the camp, internees constructed a variety of landscape
features, such as ornamental gardens, complete with koi ponds in
some cases. One pond was excavated by high school students from
the nearby town of Granada under the supervision of history teacher
John Hopper. The camp trash dump was found to contain thousands
of one-gallon tin cans that were likely soy sauce as well as a number
of one-gallon jugs of sake. Officially, the sake was not supposed
to be at the camp, but according to folklore a local Granada merchant
kept a good supply moving through the back door of his establishment.
While most of the buildings are now gone, and those that are left
are scattered across the plains of Colorado, Camp Amache still retains
much of the sense of place it possessed when so many thousands of
American citizens were imprisoned there. Internee Henry H. Okubo
years later would say that at Camp Amache “there was the feeling
of a fine line between hope and despair”.
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