We left Amarillo, TX and drove through part of the Oklahoma Panhandle. We stopped at a small museum in Boise City, OK where we learned about life in the Dust Bowl and the Santa Fe Trail. Part of traveling is learning about the history of a place.
As we traveled into Colorado, we did a quick pic of this Petrified Wood Building.
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Petrified Wood Building
in Lamar, Colorado |
In 1932 a lumber dealer, William T. Brown, decided to build a building entirely of Colorado petrified wood. Even the floor was made of petrified wood! He marketed the building as the “world’s oldest gas station” with a purported age of 175 million years. It quickly became a tourist attraction, and even earned a column from Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Granda, Colorado:
We also stopped at the Amache Museum and National Historic Site.
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1942: Executive Order 9066
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On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed for the military to create "civilian exclusion zones." While no ethnic group was specifically mentioned in the executive order, the War Department created exclusions zones along the West Coast which applied only to people of Japanese descent.
Forced Removal and Relocation:
In 1942 there were 126,000 Japanese descended people living in the U.S. and two thirds were native-born citizens.
Over 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-American were evicted from their homes.
The people were given 3 days notice to pack what belongings they could carry.
There were 10 "relocation" sites constructed in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. These relocation or imprisonment camps were in the most remote and desolate of places.
Granada War Relocation Center:
The relocation center located in Granada, Colorado was referred to as Amache for postal designation purposes.
Amache was built to accommodate up to 8,000 people, and it housed 7,318 Japanese Americans at its peak in 1943. During its three years of operation, 10,331 people passed through Amache.
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Guard and Water Towers
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Life Behind Barbed Wire:
Cramped, shared spaces and communal dining and bathing robbed incarcerees of their privacy, forcing them to adapt, subvert, and redefine private spaces.
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| Life in the Barracks |
Closing Amache:On October 15, 1945, the last Amache resident left and the camp closed its gates. Incarcerees were given $25 and a train ticket to a destination of their choosing and told to start their lives over again. Many lost everything during the forced removal three years prior.
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| Scenic drive, Colorado |
