Manzanar’s orchards: a taste of home in a hostile place

Fruit trees do not usually come to mind for a national park, yet the National Park Service says one third of all U.S. national parks have old fruit trees. At Manzanar National Historic Site in California's Owens Valley, nearly 100-year-old trees date from the valley's early agricultural settlement, and in World War II they gave Japanese Americans held at Manzanar some of the few fresh foods in a harsh place.

Manzanar street scene in spring, 1943. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress.

A camp and its orchards

Manzanar is the best-preserved of the Japanese American War Relocation Centers run by the federal government from 1942 to 1945. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, and 100,000 Japanese Americans, many of them U.S. citizens, were taken in the name of national security to ten hastily built War Relocation Centers in seven states for the rest of the war. Conditions were harsh in the tarpaper barracks, and many lost all their property.

Each camp had to be self-sufficient, and the people at Manzanar raised chickens, hogs, vegetables and fruit. The camp's orchards had recently been abandoned by farmers who sold them to Los Angeles, and they responded well to the incarcerees' care. Even though Los Angeles's efforts to harness the Owens River for drinking water had deprived the area of groundwater, the trees yielded pears, apples, peaches, figs and apricots. The Park Service says the sweetness of the fruit may briefly have relieved the guard towers, cramped quarters, bitter cold, searing heat and sandstorms, and may have carried some people back to their pre-war lives working the Pacific coast's land, raising strawberries, roses and cut flowers.

Making a desert livable

Over their three years of confinement the incarcerees built Japanese gardens from salvaged rocks and native plants, and a reservoir and irrigation channels to bring water back to barren soil, which the page calls a remarkable demonstration of the human spirit.

The landscape today

The National Park Service is partly restoring the landscape to its World War II appearance. Two barracks, a mess hall, the auditorium and a guard tower have been restored, along with many Japanese gardens and cultivated areas. Sixty-three historic fruit trees in the four surviving orchard areas have been rejuvenated, and replacement trees are being planted where trees are missing.

An orchard at Manzanar National Historic Site, with pear trees nearly 100 years old, cared for by the National Park Service. NPS photo.

The page calls the landscape a monument to both human failing and remarkable endeavor: of more than 10,000 incarcerees, 146 died at Manzanar, and five graves remain. In early fall, it says, a visitor may find a box of freshly harvested Manzanar pears on the visitor center counter.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "A Taste of Home in a Hostile Place" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/featured_stories_manz-taste-of-home-in-a-hostile-place.htm); a photograph naming a private person and a 2004 site plan on aerial imagery are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.