Amache National Historic Site

A National Historic Landmark Since 2006 And A Unit Of The National Park System Since 2022. One Of Ten Camps In Which Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During The Second World War; At Its Peak It Held About 7,300 People, Which Briefly Made It The Tenth Largest City In Colorado. · Granada, Colorado

Between 1942 and 1945 about seven thousand three hundred people, most of them American citizens, were held behind barbed wire on a square mile of the Colorado plains because they were of Japanese descent. At its peak Amache was the tenth-largest city in the state. It had a high school, a newspaper, a co-op, a silk-screen shop that printed navy recruitment posters, and a cemetery. More than four hundred men left it to serve in the United States Army and thirty-one of them were killed. What makes this site unusual is who kept it: from the 1990s a Granada high school teacher named John Hopper and his students maintained the grounds, ran a museum and recovered artefacts, decades before anyone in Washington was interested. It became a National Park unit in 2022. The camp itself is mostly foundations, gravel streets and a reconstructed barrack and water tower, with the traces of the rock gardens people built beside their barracks still visible in the dirt if you know to look down for them.

County Road 23 5/10, Granada, Colorado, 81041, United States

The grounds are generally open during daylight hours year-round and there is no entrance fee. THIS IS A VERY NEW AND VERY SMALL PARK UNIT - facilities and staffing are limited and are still being developed, and visitor services can be intermittent. The separate Amache Museum in the town of Granada, run by the school's preservation society, keeps its own limited hours and holds most of the collection. The gravel camp roads are driveable in dry weather. The annual Amache Pilgrimage takes place in May.

Amache National Historic Site on Spottos · Explore more places on Spottos