Granada, Colorado

Granada is a small farming/ranching community in north-central Prowers County. Nothing big or famous ever happened here but about a mile west of town was Camp Amache, one of ten Japanese Internment Camps constructed and populated during World War II. During the course of the war, several thousand families were moved through the camp. Besides being of Japanese descent everybody had one thing in common: when they arrived each person only had one bag at most with them. Everyone had been forced to abandon or give away everything else they had owned before boarding the trains that took them to the internment camps. When the war was over everyone was released and had to make their own way back to wherever and begin their lives over again from scratch...

Camp Amache was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 and became a designated National Historic Landmark in 2006. Students from Granada Undivided High School have set up a museum for the "Granada War Relocation Center" as a school project. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed House Bill HR 1492, guaranteeing $38,000,000 in federal money to restore the Granada relocation center and the other nine internment camps. Very little restoration work has been done at any of the camps since. At this point, the location offers a view of the footings of many of the barracks-style buildings the folks lived in, and the cemetery where children who died at the camp were buried.

The Japanese cemetery at Camp Amache