Minidoka National Historic SiteСтраница 9 из 20
Minidoka: how a remote Idaho tract became a War Relocation Authority camp, 1942 to 1945
For three years, the Minidoka camp in Idaho was the seventh largest city in the state. It was a place where West Coast people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, were incarcerated during World War II. This page summarizes the National Park Service's description of the Minidoka National Historic Site cultural landscape, including how the site was chosen, what the camp held, and what remains.
Landscape at Minidoka National Historic Site. NPS photo.
How people came to be sent here
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the War Department to prescribe military areas from which people could be excluded. The general commanding the Western Defense Command used it to create two military areas: one covering the western halves of Oregon and Washington and of California, and the southern half of Arizona, and a second covering the rest of California.
The first exclusion order was for Bainbridge Island, Washington, and gave fifty-four Nikkei families, Japanese emigrants and their descendants, six days to prepare. Their departure on March 30, 1942, alarmed Nikkei communities along the coast and confirmed rumors that more removals were coming. Many closed businesses, consolidated their homes and secured possessions; goods were sold in haste, causing significant economic losses. At temporary assembly centers they could bring only what they could carry, without knowing where they were going or for how long.
Why this site
A road in the Minidoka cultural landscape. NPS photo.
Minidoka appears to have been one of the earliest sites picked by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). It met all of the WRA's site criteria: a remote tract of public land, a railway line three miles to the south, electricity available six miles south from the Idaho Power Company, and water from the Milner-Gooding Canal for irrigation once smaller canals were built and land cleared.
People and numbers
| Fact | Figure |
|---|---|
| First arrivals at the railroad spur, after two months of construction | August 10, 1942: 212 Nikkei from the Puyallup Assembly Center |
| Arrival rate from August 16 | 500 a day, from Puyallup, Washington, then Portland, Oregon |
| Residents once relocation was complete, September 14, 1942 | 8,381 |
| Peak population, 1942 | 9,500 |
| People in the center's custody, September 1942 to October 1945 | 13,078, of whom 12,758 were admitted to the center |
| Births and deaths | 489 births and 193 deaths |
The landscape
The region sits between the Camas Prairie, the Snake River, Craters of the Moon National Monument and several mountain ranges, a rolling high-desert sagebrush steppe with basalt outcroppings. The site is nationally significant under National Register Criterion A for its link to the mass incarceration of Nikkei during the war, with a period of significance of 1942 to 1945.
Block 22 Barrack at Minidoka National Historic Site. The camps followed a military "theater of operations" design meant for speed and short use, so nearly all the housing was timber frame on concrete piers with tar paper walls. NPS photo.
The center covered 34,063 acres. Its central area, 946 acres, held people in about 600 barrack buildings, along with space for work and recreation and for the War Relocation Authority's offices and staff housing. The central area sat in a crescent between the North Side Canal and basalt outcroppings, ringed by eight watchtowers and, for nearly six months, a five-strand barbed wire fence. Over the three years the people held there added ball fields, victory gardens and residential gardens; they also built and kept extensive farm plots and animal farms. The rest of the land stayed undeveloped sagebrush steppe.
A Japanese-style ornamental garden in the entrance area contained mounds, basalt boulders on and around them, stepping stones, trees along the edge and planted shrubs and flowers. NPS photo.
After the camp closed
After the camp closed in 1945, most buildings and nearly all of the 34,000 acres were split into parcels. Some were given to World War II veterans for homesteading in land lotteries in 1947 and 1949. About 85 acres stayed with the Bureau of Reclamation, and 72.22 of those were proclaimed a National Monument and transferred to the National Park Service in 2001.
Built as a temporary installation, nearly every dominant feature was removed. A scattering of buildings, foundations, remnant roads and walkways, trees, garden traces and artifacts from the camp era remains.
Foundation of a building at Minidoka National Historic Site. NPS photo.
The park lists the landscape traits that contribute to the site's significance as its natural systems, spatial organization, cluster arrangement, archeological resources, cultural traditions, circulation, buildings and structures, and vegetation.
Sources
- National Park Service, Minidoka National Historic Site, "Minidoka National Historic Site Cultural Landscape", https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/minidoka-national-historic-site-975323.htm; rewritten in hubnx's own words.