Amache Internment Camp

Listed: 2001

Constructed: 1942

Closest Town to Resource: Granada

Significance: Constructed in 1942 as one of a few Japanese internment camps in the nation, the Granada Relocation Center, also known as Amache, was built on Colorado’s eastern plains. Surrounded by barbed wire and wood-framed guard towers, the camp at Amache consisted of housing units, a school, a hospital, warehouses, utility buildings, and a military police compound. Over 7,000 of our fellow citizens were relocated to Amache, where they lived and worked until the camp closed in 1945. Today the site retains tangible reminders of those years, including foundations of camp facilities, trees planted by former internees, one of only three surviving relocation center cemeteries in the nation, and intact original dirt and gravel roads.

Few physical structures remain, however, as the camp buildings were dispersed through auction and sale to locations around southeastern Colorado after it closed. The Friends of Amache, the Amache Preservation Society, the National Park Service, Colorado Preservation, Inc., the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Colorado’s Congressional Delegation have been working together to document and garner support for the preservation of Amache. In February 2006, Amache was designated a National Historic Landmark. In 2007, the Friends of Amache and the National Park Service organized a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan and Conceptual Development Plan outlining the interpretive and educational goals of the Amache site.

A 2011 inventory of existing building stock related to Amache was completed, which included residential, administrative, institutional, and civic buildings within the southeastern region of Colorado. A 2015 Weekend Workshop put in an original brick floor to a barrack property. The original water tower tank was found, mostly intact, at a nearby ranch and has been put back on the site with a guard tower. In 2018, Recreation Hall 11F was moved from the town of Granada back to its original foundation at Amache. Grants continue to be acquired for this site which is also one of CPI’s projects. CPI is actively engaged in the project and helped support the successful designation of the site as a National Park Site in 2022. The Preservation Services staff continues to administer Japanese American Confinement (JACS) grants and recently received a $25,000 grant for a full documentary video from the Telling the Full Story grants program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).