The foundations of Camp Amache

In the 1940s, Amache was the seventh-largest town in Colorado was Amache. What made Amache stand out was none of its residents arrived in Colorado voluntarily. 

Built outside the small town of Granada, not far from the Kansas border, Camp Amache (also called the Granada Work Relocation Center) was one of the 10 isolated internment camps created after the attack on Pearl Harbor to contain Japanese-Americans during World War II. Eastern Colorado doesn’t have many hills, but Amache occupies one that spared the camp from flooding. Driving onto the site feels like trespassing some unusual ghost town. 

Were it not for the water tower and second tower, the hill could seem innocuous. Most evidence of the camp fortifications has vanished. No more barbwire fences form a perimeter. One guard tower of the original eight still stands. The water tower that once provided for more than 7,000 people is still visible from the road. 

After the last internees left the camp in October 1945, the buildings were razed. Foundations of the more than 550 buildings still stand and are easily visible. 

Trees and desert plants have grown among the blocks, although the road system is intact and one can drive among the ruins of the once-expansive camp. Prairie rattlesnakes are the only permanent residents these days. 

 The government removed these people from their homes, took away their property and left them in unfamiliar territory – hostile territory, given the anti-Japanese sentiment enflamed after Pearl Harbor. While some Colorado Plains locals accommodated the newcomers, bad feelings ran rampant. 

The internees lived on 600-plus acres, with the rest of the 10,000-acre camp reserved for agriculture. Despite the camp conditions, the farmland proved rich. During the camp’s existence, its residents proved adept at raising vegetables, as they raised enough to feed the whole camp and have extra food for the Army and other internment camps. 

The rapid uprooting of the Japanese-American population pulled them out of communities mostly in California and more than 1,000 miles away. For the most part, people forcibly moved here tried their best to preserve some semblance of normalcy. The camp even built a high school in 1943 and boasted a football team. 

But normalcy proved difficult as families lived in a single room, and single people and childless couples had to shared rooms with strangers, with sheets between bunks the only privacy. 

A single reconstructed barracks also stands. Along with a wood stove and a single lightbulb people crowded into single rooms. One could only imagine freezing nights on the Colorado Plains in those conditions. 

Not all stayed. When restrictions against Japanese-American military service were lifted, many able-bodied men joined the Army’s 442nd Infanty Regimental Combat Team, comprised entirely of men with Japanese ancestry and the most decorated unit in U.S. military history. 

Amache joined the national park system as a national historic site in 2022, following the path of the camps at Manzanar (California) and Minidoka (Idaho). Granada hosts a museum, and a handful of interpretative signs dot the ruins. 

People passing Amache on U.S. 50 owe it to themselves to drive to the top of that hill. Among the Amache ruins, one finds a stern reminder that the rights Americans consider absolute can be removed with the stroke of a pen.