Inyo County, California BBS

[inyobbs]

[original online story includes video footage]
Oct 30, 2007 7:55 pm US/Pacific
Off The Beaten Path: Manzanar Camp
Calif. (CBS13) ― After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, America rounded up Japanese Americans into ten internment camps nationwide.

Today camps like Tule Lake in far north eastern California are abandoned behind rusting fences with few objects remaining.

But at the Manzanar camp near the town of independence in Inyo county, construction is underway.

The national park service has chosen one re-location camp to develop. Manzanar has been picked because it's relatively close to visitors from major cities like Los Angeles, Reno and Sacramento. And the message here is clear.

"Probably the most important thing about Manzanar is it was a time in our history when we ignored the constitution and we put people, American citizens behind barbed wire without due process of law," explains Gretal Enck, who is a park supervisor.

Two thirds of the more than ten thousand internees here were American citizens by birth. Though, many protested, most simply adapted to a new life as best they could. Now exhibits are being built to show what existence was like here.

"People are generally very moved by this site, and they talk about their experiences with Japanese American people who were not part of the internment, but who knew people who were," says Maggie Wittenburg, local historian.

Today foundations of a few barracks remain, someone wrote their name and date in the concrete here: "tom's crew, 1943."

The views at this high desert camp were spectacular, but the living was crude.

"They had a really big issue at first with the dust coming through the cracks in the floors and walls and they would actually hammer the lids of tin cans on the floor over these cracks," said Ben Hayes, who is a park ranger.

"When you look around Manzanar today there is not much but a lot of empty desert. But consider at one time there were over five hundred acres of barracks here," Hayes said.

Just two have been salvaged. Other structures like this guard tower have been reconstructed. Rock gardens crafted by the prisoners are being rebuilt and a three mile dirt road around the camp has been completed. Now you can see the fruit orchard the Japanese planted, and the cemetery where some of the internees who died here are remembered.
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Source: http://cbs13.com/seenon/off.the.beaten.2.490570.html
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Copied for historical use by Denise S. Flynn, Coordinator, Inyo GenWeb