The Amache National Historic Site: How an abandoned confinement site became the newest US national park

During World War Two, this haunting site was home to more than 7,500 interned Japanese Americans and was 50% more crowded than New York City.

Situated in on the barren, windy plains near the Colorado-Kansas border, about a 3.5-hour drive south-east of Denver and its famous Rocky Mountain skyline, the Granada Relocation Center isn't a place where many travellers go. But that may soon change. 

Abandoned in 1945 at the end of World War Two, the centre (officially called the Amache National Historic Site) only includes a handful of reconstructed and restored army-style barracks, a water tower and a guard tower sprouting from the prairie's dry shortgrass and sagebrush. But look closely, and you'll find traces of the more than 10,000 Japanese Americans who were either incarcerated or processed here from 1942-1945.

"It might seem like there's not much out there," said Dr Bonnie J Clark, a professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Denver who co-directs the Amache Project, which researches and helps preserve the site. "But the more time you spend, it's just a really powerful and evocative place." 

In February 2024, these haunting ruins located just outside the 400-person hamlet of Granada,  Colorado, officially became the newest (and perhaps most unlikely) US national park. According to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the site's establishment as federally protected land is a critical step in remembering the painful history that Japanese Americans endured.

"As a nation, we must face the wrongs of our past in order to build a more just and equitable future," Haaland said in a statement. "The Interior Department has the tremendous honour of stewarding America's public lands and natural and cultural resources to tell a complete and honest story of our nation's history."

Following Japan's Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941, a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment spread across the nation, with many suspecting that Japanese and Japanese Americans might act as espionage agents and enemies of the state. In March 1942, US President Franklin Roosevelt authorised military commanders to forcibly remove all persons deemed a threat to national security. 

The order didn't specify one ethnic group. But it paved the way for the US to order the removal of Japanese nationals and US citizens of Japanese ancestry to remote incarceration centres  across the Western US – including Amache.

The mass expulsion impacted more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry – two-thirds of whom were US citizens. Given only between four days and two weeks' notice, residents were ordered to pack their belongings and abandon their homes for incarceration. Initially, some people were sent to temporary "assembly centres" that were cobbled together on fairgrounds and racetracks until permanent camps could be constructed (many by incarcerees themselves).

Because these incarceration camps were rarely discussed among the Japanese American community after the war ended in 1945, descendants, like Dr Kirsten Leong, often knew very little about their family's history.

"The fact that I didn't know a lot about the experience is pretty common for my generation," said Leong, whose maternal grandmother's family was held at Amache. 

As a child, Leong recalls hearing just one story about her relatives being forced from their Los Angeles home to an assembly centre just 13 miles away in city of Arcadia. Here at the famous Santa Anita Racetrack, where champion thoroughbred Seabiscuit had raced to victory only two years prior, people were forced to live in converted horse stalls. 

"My grandmother always wrinkled up her nose and made a face," Leong said. "I never understood that until I learned that three days before, the horses were living in the horse stalls." 

Leong's family was transferred after a few months to Amache, one of the US' 10 confinement sites, named "relocation centres". From Tule Lake in California to Heart Mountain in Wyoming and Minidoka in Idaho, the centres were built on isolated public land far from cities and towns.

The country's smallest incarceration camp, Amache was the only relocation centre constructed on private land seized by eminent domain (which empowers the US government to take private property and convert it for public use). It opened on 27 August 1942 and quickly ballooned into Colorado's 10th-largest city, with roughly 7,500 people confined to just one square mile during its peak – making it 50% more densely populated than New York City at the time, according to the National Park Service. 

In many ways, Amache's unlikely evolution from abandoned prison to US national park is thanks to a former Granada High School teacher and current principal named John Hopper. In 1993, Hopper began documenting Amache's history as a class project and established the Amache Preservation Society (APS). With the help of volunteer students and organisations like the town of Granada and the University of Denver, the APS reconstructed the site's buildings, renovated its cemetery and established the Amache Museum and research centre in Granada.

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"The mostly Japanese American internees lived for more than three years within the one square mile that stretches out before you now to the south," said a guide on the free self-driving tour, which offered historical context as I moved through each stop. 

Despite the camp's harsh circumstances, the internees worked together to survive and created an active community. Organised like a military camp, there were 29 residential blocks, each containing 12 barracks used for living quarters, plus a mess hall and recreation hall. Six families lived in one barrack and shared bathroom facilities, allowing little privacy.

In addition, there were hospitals and schools, social activities and sports programmes, even Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Families grew crops, created a successful silk-screen shop and established a co-op with barber shops, shoe stores and more. Detainees living behind the barbed wire did their best to maintain a sense of normalcy, even as armed guards patrolled the camp and manned the eight guard towers surrounding the perimeter. 

Amache closed after WW2, and once the last people left in October 1945, its buildings were demolished or sold off to the public. 

Every two years since 2008 (minus 2020), Clark conducts archaeological field work and research at the site alongside students and Amache survivors and descendants. At the end of each summer, she presents her findings at open houses for Amache families  and the general public. Over the years, she has found evidence that residents planted gardens and uncovered the remains of a sumo pit, Japanese baths, footpaths and baseball fields. Thousands of cottonwood and Siberian elm trees they planted are reminders of life at Amache. 

"That investment in a place [where] people didn't choose to live, I think, really speaks to an insistence on your own humanity and also on taking care of one another," Clark said.

Although Leong still knows very little about her family's life at Amache, other than hearing one uncle had graduated from the prison's high school and the other taught there, she learned more when she began volunteering with Clark in 2012. 

What's evident to her is how the prejudice that sought to disband Japanese communities following WW2 has rippled into modern times. Not only did incarceration affect Japanese American family structures, it also created generational trauma beyond WW2, when people were given incentives to start new lives away from the Japanese American communities that no longer existed across much of the West Coast. 

"They were allowed to go back 'home', but there was no home to go back to," Leong said. "My generation [is] now discovering, 'Oh, so that's why I don't know any other Japanese people. That's why we don't talk about our heritage." 

Today, visitors to the newest US national park can see the three decades of APS' preservation efforts, like the restored towers and recreation hall, as well as the cemetery and "monument house". Originally built as a columbarium, the monument house was supposed to protect cremated remains. But because the incarcerees didn't want to leave behind ashes after being released in 1945, it now houses a memorial to honour those who passed away while incarcerated at Amache. A second memorial inscribed with US military casualties from Amache was erected in the cemetery in 1983.

According to Amache site manager Christopher Mather, it will take a few years for the NPS to implement more educational programming and a dedicated visitor's centre. But by late summer 2024, Mather says staff will be on site to escort visitors on free tours inside the recreation hall and barracks. (Check the NPS site for updated information.) In the meantime, the NPS says that the self-driving tour created by the APS is the best way for visitors to learn about the site's history.

Mather suggests that visitors start at the Amache Museum, located about 1.5 miles from the Amache National Historic Site. There, visitors can see historical photographs and documents of the prisons - as well as archaeological finds from the site and objects donated by survivors – from an intricate kimono to a simple suitcase that held the precious few personal belongings people were allowed. It’s also where to get maps and historical fact from NPS staff, who work inside its offices, before visiting the actual/physical camp.

"The museum is where a lot of people will get the information that they'll need to then go out and really get the best experience on site," Mather said. 

Mather recognises that Amache's new designation as a national park is the culmination of decades of work. But by sharing the stories of survival and pain, he hopes that their experiences will echo into the future.

"It's a story that needs to be told," he said, "so that it doesn't happen again."

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