History of The Camp
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which declared the west coast of the United States a military zone. This allowed for the evacuation of 120,000 Japanese Americans, who were rounded up and placed into concentration camps across the country. The Jerome War Relocation Camp was located in Southeast Arkansas in Chicot and Drew Counties. It was one of two relocation centers in Arkansas, the other being at Rohwer, 27 miles (43 km) north of Jerome. The Jerome site consisted of tax-delinquent lands situated in the marshy delta of the Mississippi River's flood plain that had been purchased in the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration. The A. J. Rife Construction Company of Dallas, Texas, built the Jerome Camp at a cost of $4,703,347.
The Jerome camp was divided into 50 housing blocks surrounded by a barbed wire fence, a patrol road, and seven watchtowers. The only entrances were from the main highway on the west and on the back of the camp to the east. The camp was officially declared open, although it was not completely finished, in September 1942. It was the last center to open and the first to close, and was only in operation for 634 days—the fewest number of days of any of the relocation camps.
The constant movement of camp populations makes completely accurate statistics difficult. As of January 1943, the camp had a population of 7,932 people. Most had been farmers before the war. Fourteen percent were over the age of sixty, and there were 2,483 school age children in the camp, thirty-one percent of the total population. Thirty-nine percent of the residents were under the age of nineteen. Sixty-six percent were American citizens, and the remainder were aliens.
The camp was closed in June 1944 and turned into a German Prisoner of War Camp. Upon closing, camp residents were sent to other camps including Heart Mountain, Gila River, Granada, and Rohwer.
Read more about this topic: Jerome War Relocation Center
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