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
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or camp:
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)