Via The Upworthiest

 

High schoolers preserved a Japanese internment camp for decades. Now, it’s a national park.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, a wave of fear ran through the country that led America to violate the civil liberties of tens of thousands of its own citizens. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and people of Japanese ancestry in ten camps throughout the country.

Two-thirds of those interned were U.S. citizens.

The smallest of the camps, Amache in southeast Colorado, housed around 10,000 internees from 1942 to 1945, with a peak of 7,318 in 1943.

At the camp, internees lived in military-style barracks. Some worked producing agricultural products and others labored in the silkscreen shop or at the cooperative store. The camp also had a barbershop, schools for children and a hospital. Amache also had the largest number of internees volunteer or be drafted into service during World War II of any internment camp.

After the war, in 1947, most of Amache’s original building stock was sold through the War Assets Administration.

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